THE WINTERAGE // The Burren // Co. Clare // IRELAND

An ancient transhumance that has actively sculpted the landscape of the Burren in the far reaches of western Ireland for thousands of years

I am currently researching multiple traditions of the area to bring to the archive when I have had a chance to make them myself, like wild kid goat, real blood pudding and the use of nettles with cabbage and bacon. This piece is to fix relevance and importance to this particular tradition of transhumance, and allow the Winterage to stand alone.

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THE WINTERAGE

Max Jones

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Every year I join with herders to drive cattle along ancient routes in a form of traditional pastoralism known as transhumance. I speak and write about it because for me, it offers a profound and immediate connection to the land and earth I tread. Much like fishing the traditional salmon nets of the river Blackwater in Ireland or beating the smoked chestnuts of Bagneri in Italy, it is in walking with a stick in hand, guiding cattle along the long-trodden routes that seasonally map mountains, where I find deepest meaning. There is purpose in the immediacy of it all, stepping into a pre-defined role whose heritage spans thousands of years. These are long-established mechanisms evolved to sustain life in a particular place, through the repeated, seasonal transformation of that place into food. 

Each spring in the prealps of northern Italy, I join the herders of Biella to drive their cattle on foot over 25 kilometres and an elevation of more than a thousand metres to the alpine pasture that looms high above the valley where the herd has spent the winter. Once up there, the cows turn the mountain’s rich flora into milk, which in turn is stabilised into butter and cheese using  ancient methods that have nothing to do with enforced chemical use or the rules laid out by the anachronistic Food Safety Authorities.

Then comes the autumn, when those herders and cattle must come off the mountain by the same route they came up before the snows and blizzards of winter, back to the safety of the valley below. This is a beautiful transhumance as the native breed glows the same reddish brown as the falling leaves of the forests we guide them through, and when we stop to rest, the food that fuels this journey is the cheese and cured meat made from the herd. The mountain gives us the energy we need to make food from that mountain. A powerful, unbroken cycle that dates back to the Bronze Age. This is the real food I am drawn to, unsullied and honest. At this time of year, I bring this piece of Italy down off the mountain to feed me when I climb another in Ireland the following week for the curious reverse transhumance tradition of the Winterage.

The Burren in the west of Ireland, feels incredibly old. From the flatlands of Clare and Galway, broad, monotone mounds loom in the distance. This limestone territory of the Burren appears in a steely blue, a dead slate, a pearl grey contrasting with the lowland greens of the fields below, peach yellow and pink at sunrise or polished silver and gold when the rain comes and wets the shimmering mountainside. It can be bone white, and on a winter’s sunset, it becomes a lunar desert, lighting up dolmens and erratic boulders that were deposited in the Ice Age by sweeping glaciers, their long shadows rippling and falling into the grykes and clints of the limestone pavement. As you get closer, fields are demarcated by hand-built walls made with pieces of sharp, angular chunks, and dry-piled on top of each other leaving gaps enough to see through their stony patterns to the other side.  

Gradually the fields themselves take on the same colours of the approaching mountains. The walls strike out over fields of rock in broken-toothed lines that follow the swirling waves and folds of Mullaghmore, Slieve Rua and Knockanes, enormous tiered cakes of limestone whose contours make me think of sandcastles being pulled back into the sea by the tide.

This remarkable pasture, characterised mainly by the smooth fissures and grykes in the limestone pavement that have been gently eroded by rain, with smooth channels patterning the stone into what look like giant vertebrae of sea mammals. In fact, as you run your hand over the limestone you can make out recognizable marine fossils, and looking up at these mountains, you realise that the entire landscape is an ocean bed made solid with the bones of sea creatures over millions of years. 

During the summer months, the Burren becomes a worldwide destination for botanists and geologists. Down in the cracks of the grykes and fissures, between huge limestone clints, ancient seeds have been able to flower. For all the barrenness of the landscape, the Burren holds around 75% of Ireland’s biodiversity. 

As with every single place in Ireland, the anglicised name of the The Burren masks the richness of true Irish place-names. In Irish, Boirinn means the ‘rocky place’ and is a rare habitat; a priority for protection under the EU Habitats Directive. Now a Special Area of Conservation, where initially the approach would be to come in and protect the area from bogus practices, usually by paying the all-too-vilified farmers not to work the precious land with damaging conventional methods.

But this Burren biodiversity is actually a result of the farming tradition of transhumance that has remained unbroken for six thousand years.

There are hundreds of farms scattered across the Burren whose cattle, having spent the summer in the green lowlands, move onto the seemingly harsh limestone winterage pasture to spend the winter grazing. It seems counterintuitive but the winterage actually offers ideal conditions for the cattle, as well as allowing a rare opportunity for the animals to graze outside throughout the whole year when usually they would spend the winter indoors against the wind and wet, eating silage. On the winterage, this is a biodiverse and wild pasture that has not been fertilised.

There is so much rain during the winter months that the lowlands often become flooded, whereas the limestone winterage offers excellent drainage as the water escapes through the ancient grykes, keeping the mountainside dry and offering constant dry lying conditions for the cattle. The Burren’s limestone mass, having absorbed the sun through the summer, radiates heat that makes it liveable for the suckling herds. The water that doesn’t immediately drain will pool in large bowls eroded into the stone leaving constant supplies of water to drink, and the cattle feed on the dead grasses and vegetation like purple moor grass, which would normally smother some seven-hundred species of plant like gentians or orchids which in the summer have a renewed access to light in order to grow. 

The erratic rocks and walls offer shelter, and I have even been lucky enough to glimpse deep into the past when a handful of cattle used a mighty dolmen for a wind-break  –  a prehistoric monument that shows how humans were on the Burren some 5800 years ago, farming cattle, sheep and goats, as well as growing grain crops. In this moment the only thing that separates me from way back then are the plastic tags in the animal’s ears. I have witnessed this in the Alps, with a man who makes illegal butter and cheese with wood and clay tools, from his undeclared herd.

The winterage is a brilliant show of human common sense and frugality. Even today the purpose remains the same, as the farmers want the animals to get as much grazing over winter as possible, cutting housing and feeding costs, usually leaving them on this wild pasture from October to April which echoes the intuitively sensible approach to grazing above the treeline in the Alps for the summer. 

At the end of October, around Samhain a weekend is dedicated to celebrate this tradition. I join the winterage having just returned from the desalpa transhumance in Biella the week before, with my cheese in the enormous poacher’s pocket of my coat. (I highly recommend this old-school method for airport security. Last year my coat weighed 14kg stuffed with walnuts, cotechino and pian paris cheese. I even fit two halves of fontina in it once!)

The celebration begins at a lowland farm, the coordinates of which are released the day before the cattle drive. People arrive at a field and make their way onto the farm, collecting sturdy hazel herding sticks that have been gathered from the hazel woodland and scrub that surrounds the winterage. Usually around 15 to 30 animals make up these suckler herds dominated by continental breeds, with the farmers and their families gathering around them. The herd is blessed with holy water and set off up the path bordered by the classic limestone walls, onto their winterage. The farmer leads the herders, standing just behind the cattle, walking slowly and calling to keep them in order. 

The walk is slow and steady, winding up the long-trodden path with occasional breaks to rest the herd after a steep climb, blue steam rising from their backs while we wait. The lowland pasture yields to the rocky limestone terrain and the path disappears into the scored crevices of limestone pavement, mottled with tufts of grass or small, hardy ferns, the cattle careful on their feet. 

After perhaps three quarters of an hour the cattle drive is over. Arrived onto the winterage, I turn around and see a line of people and their sticks so long it goes back almost all the way down to the farm. There are hundreds of us walking this ancient route. 

Coming so soon after the Italian transhumance, I think of the cultural significance of this relatively short journey. In Italy, we are perhaps twelve herders guiding 40 or so cattle. Here, we are in our hundreds behind a handful of animals, and I can’t help but wonder in these disconnected times how perhaps now, it is the cattle that guide a herd of humans in a journey that has the heart of so many.

Fresh from the transhumance in Italy, I try to be at the front with the cattle as I am used to, actively carrying out the task I am required to do with my trusty herding stick. Here on the Burren, it is a token role we perform together, with the real herding carried out by the farmer. Dropping back and chatting with these people I realise, between breaths, that everyone here has a connection to cattle and farming. Most conversations sparked by the walk are remembering parents or grandparents, the identity of family itself, the small, manageable home herds of around 10 cattle they would live with growing up. 

I listen to how milk and meat didn’t taste like it does now, and I am convinced that this is mainly because of the added value gained when we know where something is from: the village butcher, the local creamery, the neighbour’s garden. Butter made sitting around at home with the family, passing around an old biscuit tin filled with cream with a silver spoon inside, shaking and churning it by hand between bouts of laughter and stories. Then the real buttermilk was delicious and sour because the hand-milked unpasteurised cream from the small family herd was collected over several days, fermenting naturally into what we accept nowadays as crème fraîche.

There is a profound appreciation for the winterage and the farmers who sustain this unbroken farming tradition. It represents symbiosis and community, the small herd on which a family would depend and it connects us to an authentic time before we became too efficient and lost the ability to remember food’s emotional value. 

There is a security and belonging in its rhythm, with the timeless image of the animals against the great limestone mountains that can be seen by everyone in the distance, so far away. It reminds me of the bells that the cattle wear in Italy for their cacophonous journey up and down the mountain and how everyone within earshot, even though they may not even see the herd, become subconsciously part of the transhumance that signals the beginning of summer and the beginning of winter. It punctuates the year, and we can more readily remember that when we eat the food made of that place, we become it. 

In this way the transhumance is for everyone, contextualising us all. Unchanged and familiar, it offers a real-time connection to past ways that have successfully sustained life for thousands of years.  This is precisely its value - these ways are not past, we are connected to them by these ancient farming practices that still exist in exactly the same way in the present now. This is why I try and champion them, giving them more space and value, because we stand to relearn so much.

Hungry at the top of this rocky place, I cut into my wheel of cheese from Biella and it feels right to share the fragrant mountain amongst the winterage farmers and human herd of the barren, life-giving Burren. 

If you would like some follow-on material check out www.burrenbeo.com and the amazing things Brendan, Áine, Pranjali and the rest are doing for the winterage, Joanne, Neal and Donal over at Acres Burren Aran and the Dark Mountain Project.

Come and join the winterage 2024 HERE

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Please enjoy these photos from the past three winterages.