The ninth night is where it gets awkward, so reserve a cottage stay in the Burren for two

You could arrange most of this yourself, and we would rather say it now than after you have paid. The cottage lets online, the car is a form, the roads are signposted. What is left is the ninth night, a lane that will not take a low car, and a May morning that is not listed anywhere, so reserve a cottage stay in the Burren for two if that part is worth handing over.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

Most of it you could arrange yourself

Here is the honest figure first, because it decides whether you need this office at all. You could arrange most of this yourself. The cottage sits on the open letting market and takes a card online. The car hire is a form. The roads are signposted, the language is English, and the key lives in a box on the wall with a code that arrives by text two days before you land.

What is left is the awkward quarter. Nine nights is an odd length; owners think in sevens and fourteens, and the ninth night is a telephone call rather than a box you tick. Several of the lanes onto the terraces will take the underside out of a low car, and letting photographs never show the lane. And the botany mornings in May are arranged between people who know each other and are written down nowhere.

If you are content with a keybox, a rain jacket and a slow answer in February, reserve it yourself and keep our number for the part that goes wrong. We will not be offended.

Underfoot, and what it does to your ankles

The Burren is roughly 250 square kilometers of bare Carboniferous limestone, laid down about 330 million years ago, scraped clean by ice and never properly recovered. The surface breaks into flat slabs with fissures between them, some a hand's width, some wide enough to take a boot and deeper than your arm. Wet limestone is greasy. You will walk at two kilometers an hour rather than four, and you will look at your feet more than at the view, which turns out to be its own kind of attention.

The cracks hold the plants. Something like seven in ten of Ireland's native flowering species grow here, in about one per cent of the country's ground, arctic and Mediterranean things rooted a hand apart: gentian and mountain avens through late April and May, orchids into June, bloody cranesbill all summer.

Water behaves strangely as well. The seasonal lakes fill from below, up through the rock, in winter, and drain out again in a matter of days, so a field you crossed in March is under water in November.

Mornings on the pavement, afternoons waiting out the squall

Mornings are the useful part. The portal tomb on the road south of Ballyvaughan stands a field away from its car park and is worth reaching before nine, when it belongs to whoever is standing in front of it. After that the shape of a day is roughly two hours on the pavement, back to the cottage when the squall arrives, out again when it passes, and it does pass, usually inside forty minutes.

Distances are short and slow. Fanore beach and the coast road under Black Head are twenty minutes from the valley; the hairpins of Corkscrew Hill are ten; the ruined Cistercian abbey in its own side valley is about twenty five. Ennis has a Friday market and takes forty minutes each way. Doolin has music in the pubs most nights from about half nine, and the drive back is unlit single track, so one of you is not drinking.

Two of your nine days will be wet from waking to dark. County Clare records rain on well over two hundred days a year. Bring a second pair of boots, because the first pair will not dry.

The cottage, the lane and everything that is nine kilometers away

One bedroom, one bed, a solid fuel stove and a stack of turf and split timber by the door. Hot water runs on a timer, the water itself comes from a group scheme, and the immersion takes forty minutes, so a bath is a decision made in advance. Mobile signal is one bar at the gate and nothing at all in the kitchen. Broadband exists on paper.

Nothing is within walking distance, which is the point of the week and also the difficulty of it. The nearest pub is six kilometers, the village shop nine, fuel eleven. That shop shuts at six, and at one on Sunday, so a Saturday evening without milk is a thirty kilometer round trip in the dark.

A car is not optional, and it should be a small one. The lane is single track with a grass ridge down the center, stone walls on both shoulders and passing bays every two hundred meters or so; reversing uphill is a skill you will have acquired by Wednesday. Shannon is ninety kilometers away, about an hour and twenty. Galway is fifty, about an hour, and slower than the map suggests.

Who this suits, and the arithmetic

It suits two people who can spend a whole morning on forty square meters of rock and count the morning as used; who read in the evening; who accept that dinner is whatever they cooked. It suits a botanist of any standard between May and June, and a walker whose ankles still work.

It does not suit anyone who wants to leave the cottage on foot and arrive somewhere. It does not suit children who need other children. It does not suit two people who are not currently enjoying each other's company: nine nights, one room, one lane.

From $2,540 per person covers the cottage for nine nights, a small hatchback for eight days with unlimited kilometers, a grocery drop waiting on the table when you arrive, and one botany morning in season. It does not cover your own flights, fuel at somewhere near one euro eighty a litre, food, or admission anywhere. Figures are confirmed once the owner holds the dates.

You settle with the cottage owner and the car firm on their own terms. Whatever reaches this office reaches it afterwards, from them, out of margin they had already set.