*Photograph: Martin Kiely
THE BURREN’s famous biodiversity continues to be maintained through its tradition of winterage.
Celebrating the unique farming practice of out-wintering cattle remains at the heart of the annual Burren Winterage Weekend festival which took place over the weekend.
Co-ordinated by local landscape charity The Burrenbeo Trust, this year’s festival featured a wide range of farming, heritage, and cultural events in Corofin and neighbouring farms in the Burren.
In Ireland at the end of the season cattle are taken home, in the Burren it’s the opposite, the animals are released to wander in the hills, where they forage for food all winter long. Remarkably, no bovine injuries have been reported by local farmers as the cattle stay on the hill.
Burrenbeo Trust organise the annual celebration. Brendan Dunford who works with the organisation explained, “The Burren is a wonderful heritage landscape, full of biodiversity, archaeology and geology, but also a place where farmers have farmed for 6,000 years, using this very unique system of winterage where they put the cattle on the hills in wintertime and take them back on the green fields in the summer time”.
He said the winterage tradition is key to the Burren’s famous biodiversity. “The cattle spend the whole winter harvesting dead grass and vegetation from the Burren and in the spring when the cattle come back down, the sunlight can penetrate the ground flora and all this these beautiful gentians and orchids can pop out unhindered and flower and seed for the rest of the summer. This is a botanical metropolis with lots of plants from different parts of the world, Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean packed into this landscape but dependent on that farming tradition”.
Outwintering is possible because of the heat the vast area of limestone absorbs through the summer months, slowly releasing heat gradually.
