About Burren Mytho-Archaeological Excursion
Burren Mytho-Archaeological Excursions is the result of close to two years of fieldwork, research and study across the ancient sites of the Burren, producing an archive of 986 videos and photographs taken throughout that time.
That body of work shapes everything about these excursions. The sites chosen. The order in which they're visited. The context brought to each one. Nothing is accidental.
The landscape holds cairns, ring forts, wedge tombs, portal dolmens, court tombs, stone alignments, fulachta fiadha and extraordinary erratics -- large boulders placed with clear intention by people who understood physics in ways we're still working to appreciate. Nearly all the sites visited have limited public access and low footfall. You're unlikely to encounter coach parties or laminated information boards. What you will find is a genuine sense of discovery that's difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake.
The Burren: Standing Where He Stood
Running through every excursion is the work of T.J. Westropp, whose book Archaeology of the Burren was originally published as a series of articles in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland between 1896 and 1916. As we travel between locations, chapters describing each site are read aloud from recording. Many of the sites have eroded considerably since Westropp's day, which makes his words, heard standing in those same places, an extraordinary lens through which to see them.
These are not excursions that set out to hand you settled facts. They set out to prompt your own thinking. To put you in front of remarkable things and let you work out for yourself what you're seeing, and why it matters. There are questions here that mainstream archaeology hasn't satisfactorily answered, about the age of these structures, about the civilisations that built them, about Ireland's place in the prehistoric world long before the emergence of Greek culture. We don't pretend otherwise.
Every detail of the day, from the routes taken to the venues chosen for lunch, has been considered with the same care given to the research behind it. That includes mid-morning coffee beside an open hearth in a traditional Burren farmhouse, served by the farmer themselves, and lunch at the kitchen table of a locally renowned chef, or a picnic using local seasonal produce. The Burren is extraordinary. The day should be too.