Birgitta Hedin arrived in Ireland from Sweden in the late 1980s. She had not come to stay. She came because of salmon.
More precisely, she came because of a gap in the Irish food landscape that nobody seemed to notice: Ireland had some of the cleanest, coldest Atlantic water in the world, producing wild and farmed salmon of exceptional quality — and almost none of it was being smoked at the standard you could find in Scandinavia, where smoking fish is not a craft but a culture.
Birgitta had grown up with that culture. She understood what it required: the quality of the fish, the patience of the process, the discipline of real fire and real smoke over a period that cannot be rushed. She saw what was missing in Ireland and decided to fill it.
She did not do it alone. Her husband Peter, Irish-born, became her collaborator — and the Burren, that extraordinary limestone plateau on the west Clare coast, became their location. Lisdoonvarna, better known as the home of the world’s largest matchmaking festival, became home to something quieter and more enduring: the Burren Smokehouse.
Salmon worth twenty-four hours
The salmon that goes into the Burren Smokehouse comes from organic farms on the west coast of Ireland. This is a specific and deliberate choice. Birgitta and Peter will not source from conventional salmon farms, regardless of price or availability. The reasoning is simple: what goes into the process determines what comes out. Organic salmon, raised in the cold Atlantic, with the space and feed that organic certification requires, produces a fish with the flavour and texture that makes the long smoking process worthwhile.
That process takes over twenty-four hours from start to finish. Real fire. Real smoke. No shortcuts. The technique Birgitta brought from Sweden has not been industrialised or abbreviated in the decades since she first applied it to Irish salmon. The timeline is the same. The method is the same. What has changed is the scale of the demand.
Ashford Castle orders from the Burren Smokehouse. The Merrion Hotel in Dublin orders from the Burren Smokehouse. The list of high-end Irish hospitality businesses that have found their way to a smallholding in Lisdoonvarna to source smoked salmon is not short, and it is not accidental. It is the result of a product that cannot be replicated by faster, cheaper methods — and of two people who decided, decades ago, not to compromise.
The food that has a geography
The smokehouse sells directly through its website (burrensmokehouse.ie), ships internationally, and supplies retailers across Ireland. But Birgitta and Peter have added a second dimension to the business that matters in a different way: they teach it.
The food tourism operation — Burren Experiences — brings visitors to Lisdoonvarna to understand where their salmon comes from, how it is smoked, and why the Burren itself is essential to the story. The landscape is not incidental. The limestone pavement, the unusual microclimate, the proximity to the Atlantic — these are not marketing language. They are the conditions that make this specific place produce what it produces.
For many visitors, the experience is a first encounter with the idea that food has a geography. That the taste in a fillet of smoked salmon can be traced to a specific coast, a specific current, a specific way of farming. That between the sea and the table there are people who have chosen to do something carefully, over time, in a particular place.
A Clare story for Clare diaspora
We understand this attachment well. The Burren appears in our readers’ ancestry searches more than almost any other landscape in Ireland. Many Love Ireland readers have Clare lines: grandparents who left these same townlands for Boston or Chicago or Melbourne, who tried to explain what the Burren looked like to children who had never seen it.
Birgitta and Peter’s story sits inside that geography. Their smokehouse is not a heritage attraction. It is a working business — Swedish-Irish in its origins, deeply Clare in its roots — that has built its reputation over thirty years on the basis of not cutting corners. If you’re tracing your own Irish roots, our Find Your Irish County tool can help locate the exact county your family came from — and plan a visit that goes beyond the guidebook.
If you come to the west of Ireland looking for something genuine rather than a performance of authenticity, a morning in Lisdoonvarna is as close as you can get.
The salmon takes twenty-four hours to smoke properly. Some things are worth the time.
The Burren Smokehouse is in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare. Online orders and visitor experience bookings at burrensmokehouse.ie and burrenexperiences.ie.
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