High in the Burren above Ballyvaughan.

Higher in the karst terrain, farther into the Burren, the lushness of the farmland gives way to the characteristic hardscrabble of exposed limestone.

[See the little dark smudge just above the horizon against the clouds about 1/4 of the way from the right-hand edge of the frame?  That's the result of a speck of dust that attached itself to the digital camera's sensing surface during a change from telephoto to normal lens... and it stayed there for the rest of our Ireland trip!!!  I had to have it professionally cleaned off once we returned to the US.

That smudge is actually on every single picture we took with that camera for the remaining three weeks of our trip -- but once I knew it was there (after the pictures in this batch were taken), I got to be pretty adept at hiding it, framing pictures so that the smudge would be on "busy" or dark parts of the picture.  That generally involved taking pictures with the camera upside down: I got used to using my thumb instead of my index finger to trigger the shutter.]