BACK HOME: Although Ennis was where she grew up, the Burren is what first comes to mind when Rosita Boland thinks of going home

Ennis is my home town. That's where I was born and grew up, but when I think of going home, I always think of the Burren first and the wild grey high place where it fuses with the Atlantic at the Cliffs of Moher. Ennis was where I lived, but the landscape of north-west Clare is the place that has left by far the most lasting impression.

On the edge of Ennis, opposite the Bishop's palace, there is a roundabout with a Maid of Erin at its centre, resplendent atop a pillar with stone wolfhound and shamrocks. The maidoferin, as it sounded to me as a child, signalled the start of the journey to north- west Clare that we took several times a year.

Ennis is a medieval market town of narrow streets and perpetual traffic jams. In the 1970s, when I was growing up there, it seemed a somewhat forbidding place, with brooding laneways like dark tributaries that led down to the Fergus river. It felt closed-in; the sky like a strip overhead in the small canyons of O'Connell Street, Abbey Street and Parnell Street. Then as now, you could cross from one side of the narrow streets to the other literally in a step or two, and the cars would scarcely miss a beat.

Perhaps it was the contrast between the tight dimensions of the town and the openness of the Burren, framed by huge skies and changing light and the westward Atlantic that first made an impact. I don't know. I can't remember seeing the Burren for the first time; it was a place I saw before I knew what memory was.

My father's job as county manager took him all over Clare. On the Saturdays or Sundays we turned for Corofin at the maidoferin, he was still working, although I had only the vaguest sense of this at the time. On these journeys round north-west Clare, he was looking over new public buildings and rural housing schemes. Over the years, I saw a lot of libraries and fire stations, which for a long time I thought were attractions in their own right, since I always associated them with these outings.

The main reason for the trips, though, was that my father was also looking at plans and applications for planning permission for private houses, located in areas of special importance. We went to the Burren far more often than other parts of Clare because, environmentally, that was always where the most potentially controversial planning applications were. But at the time, I was oblivious to the notes my father took and the maps he referred to during his periodic stops.

Once Corofin was behind us, the first stop was always solely on my behalf: Leamanegh Castle, which we simply called Máire Rua's. Máire Rua's was a ruined 15th-century tower house with a tacked-on main house from two centuries later. It stood in a field, a bit off the road, roofless but with stone window frames, and all its solid walls.

The chief joy of Máire Rua was the original winding stone stairs in the tower which led right to the roofless top. I climbed those steps every time we passed. It was dim and sometimes there were dead birds; dark stains on the dark stairs. Everything smelt of damp and otherness and, seeing the light at the top was like emerging from the well of the past, windlassed there by the steps. At the top, five storeys up, I waved to the figures in the car and studied the sheep and ruins in the adjoining fields.

It never once occurred to me that I might fall over the unprotected top or through a window on the way up. It was a ruined castle, ergo, you simply climbed the steps with more care than usual. It was utterly satisfying, finding a rhythm on the steps and an understanding of what castle meant, a word which was turning up in many of the books I was reading. Best of all, there was never anyone else there you had to share it with. That never occurred to me either.

From that point onward, the Burren came out of the ground and revealed itself. First the limestone appeared, scattered like stone puddles and then more and more of it, until the stone spread like water and filled the fields, the horizon. I knew from my mother, who loved flowers, that the many fissures of the Burren contained rare flowers in spring, which people came to look for, but which they were forbidden to pick. I was poor with details and could never remember any of the names she told me, but I loved the idea of this stone sea hiding secrets people came to try and find.

Rounding Black Head and Fanore, you could see the Aran Islands on the Atlantic, like three skips of a stone across water, and the Cliffs of Moher tiny in the distance. I could never understand why people thought grey was a dull colour. It was always grey in north Clare, but everything had its own distinctive hue; the strange grey-white limestone fields; the ever-mercurial light from a changing cloud cover; the silver and steel colours of a wild ocean I assumed for years was bottomless.

At the Cliffs of Moher, no matter what the weather, my father and I walked the muddy track to O'Brien's tower. Liscannor flag lay between the track and the edge of the cliffs, over which I knew people fell to their death from time to time and, which for me as a child, infused the place with a feeling of being some sort of terrible trapdoor to heaven.

At the tower, my father stayed below to talk to Joe Vaughan, who ran the little shop there, and I went up the metal spiral stairs to the top. It was always so wild up there, you could balance on the wind, looking at the stern arm of the cliffs. I liked it best when the sea fog came in and made everything vanish, leaving only those huge combined sounds of wind and waves. Those days, the tower felt like a periscope which I could not focus.

Last week, I drove again that route from the maidoferin in Ennis to Corofin, Leamanegh, Poulnabrone, Ballyvaughan, Fanore, Black Head, Cliffs of Moher, Liscannor, Lahinch, Ennistymon and back to Ennis.

At Leamanegh, a private driveway and locked gate stood between us and the castle. I climbed a wall and went up the driveway anyway. There was scaffolding inside the castle and two locked gates across the entrance and steps, with a sign "No unauthorised persons beyond this point". It looked as if a massive job was under way to do it up. I visualised a future of entrance fees, controlled access and no unaccompanied children.

At the Poulnabrone Dolmen, there is thankfully still no car-park. You park on the road, as ever, and walk back and across the limestone pavements. The slant of the dolmen's capstone arrows up to the sky in the same mysteriously satisfying way and the Burren skyline there and elsewhere is still thick with hazels and remarkably free of man-made influences. The stone still shines like water and the light changes on Slieve Elva as always.

The Cliffs of Moher car-park charges €4 to enter now and it was crammed with tour buses and cars. Driving there this time, my father told me that when it was rumoured a German was going to buy the land fronting the cliffs in the 1960s, Clare County Council bought it from the farmer instead. Thus were the Cliffs of Moher saved for the public from private ownership.

It now costs €1.50 to ascend the metal staircase to the roof of O'Brien's tower. Alan, the photographer, had to pay for me. It hadn't occurred to me I would need the wallet I had left in the car. The top of the tower seems much smaller than I remember, partly because there is now a wooden platform with telescopes on it and partly because the place was crammed with people.

I knew this bit of the journey would be unpleasantly different to my memories and it was, but somehow it didn't matter. You only have to walk away a bit to be alone. The light is still the same. The Burren still contains secrets. The Atlantic is still impressively unforgiving. The wind still roars there and will always roar there.