‘It is not a landscape that gives up her secrets easily, but in every fold of rock and around every corner there is always a new surprise’.
The Burren is a place full of intrigue and mystery to filmmaker Katrina Costello, who has been working there for over 13 years.
Her love for that landscape is obvious in ‘Heart of Stone’, her up-coming two-part series for RTÉ One, which captures the raw and complicated beauty of the Burren using intimate natural history photography and the spontaneous insights of a cast of local contributors.
Narrated by Brendan Gleeson, ‘Heart of Stone’ takes audiences on a journey through the ages, tracing the genetic story of the Irish people. It tells the story of the Irish hunter- gatherers and reveals what became of them. It asks if prehistoric farmers irreversibly altered this landscape and if modern Irish society is descended from those who first lived here over 10,000 years ago.
Episode One of the series will be broadcast tonight on RTÉ One at 6.30pm.
Episode One (Sunday, April 11th – 6.30pm) moves through the natural cycles of the seasons, witnessing spectacular scenes from the natural world, discovering Celtic rainforests and exploring complex subjects, like the formations of the rocks and underground caverns and mysterious disappearing lakes on the Burren.
Episode Two locates clues written in the stones, tombs, and underground caverns that populate the Burren and that help us to travel back in time to reveal fresh secrets of the human story.
We discover what Ireland might have looked like when the first nomadic big-game hunters came here. We follow the three distinct populations that lived in Ireland in prehistoric times and unravel the secrets of this unique and mysterious landscape and those who lived on it.
