Given a choice, I would never have found myself trudging through a derelict children's graveyard on a remote Connemara mountainside, lashed by icy rain and gale-force winds. But I wasn't given a choice. "Doyle, you'll meet me at the pub in Recess tomorrow at eleven o'clock. There's someone here I think you should meet." My friend Sinead Foyle, a flame-haired thirty-year-old beauty who grew up nearby, doesn't make polite requests—she gives orders. And because she's never wrong, I follow them. Which was how I found myself in a mountain graveyard for unbaptized children, suicides, and strangers, braving wicked February weather with Sinead and Michael Gibbons, an archaeologist who carries under his cap the country's unabridged history from at least 7000 b.c. "Now don't walk with your hands in your pockets," Michael warned in a thick brogue, "and don't touch that or any bush or you'll draw the wrath of the faerie host down on your head." I don't know if he was serious, but clearly some force of nature was seriously annoyed.

Ireland's weather unfairly suffers a terrible reputation. Bathed in the warm-water currents of the Gulf Stream and cooled by southwesterly Atlantic breezes, the island rarely sees temperatures reach freezing or rise high enough to make the skin glisten. In summer, the sun shines often and long, rising before five in the morning and not setting fully until nearly eleven at night, but even in February, when the days are short, the grass is thick and green, the ferns flourish, and the occasional wildflower blooms. On the rare warm spring afternoon, teenage girls parade home from school with their fair faces turned up toward the sun or sit on stone walls, shoes off, pulling up their standard-issue blouses to expose plump pink middles to the light.

But today, the weather, to borrow from the local vernacular, was shite. Our destination was an ancient holy spot high up the mountain, but the winds were so violent that waterfalls were reversing direction and spraying up into the sky, and waterspouts whirled up like menacing gray ghosts and danced across the lakes. Our pilgrimage plans were scuttled. Instead, we dried off by candlelight (the electricity was out) over tea and Cadbury chocolate bars in a pub at a crossroads named Letterfrack.

Since the late nineteenth century, Ireland has located its soul in Connemara's vast treeless expanse of mountains, lakes, and rugged coast. The west is the Ireland of wide-open spaces, but Connemara's are the widest, and its mountain valleys seem vast enough to cradle the country whole. "When the great patriots were battling the British, it wasn't Georgian Dublin they were dying for—not a country that was industrialized or fancy or swish—it was the vision, the ashling, of this, of Irish-speaking Ireland, a country of small farms and fishing," Michael told us.

Connemara still brims with the old ashling. Dotted with lakes, covered in blanket bog, surrounded by sea, and with mountains at its heart, it's a virtual island that's a velvety green in summer and burned by salty winds to a seaside desert of deep sienna in winter. They say that Killary Harbour, Ireland's only fjord, is large enough to hold the entire fleet of any of the world's navies, and you can debate the fact over toasted cheese sandwiches before the fire at Gaynor's Pub in Leenane, which sits at the top of the harbor and where you might meet the town priest. If he's not wearing his collar, you'll recognize him by his sports car with the surfboard on top. In a storm, the windblown rain bruises the slate surface of the harbor, seagulls wheel, riding the gusts high into the sky, and the mountains, mottled green and gold and gray, roll on to the horizon.