On my last night in Connemara, Sinead invited me to a dinner party hosted by Jeananne Crowley, an actress from Dublin who recently bought an old rectory near the sea. "I've moved to Connemara to re-create the life I had in Dublin decades ago," Jeananne said, giddy at the prospect. "When I ask the butcher here if I should have the lamb or the beef, he brings me a gin and tonic and says, 'Okay, now sit down and let's talk about it.' When the school needs painting, we all paint the school. The sense of community here is very powerful."

And so, it sounds, is the fear that it could all slip away. Talk turned to the story of a developer who tried to build an airstrip on a bog here but was defeated by environmentalists. The general sense is that the victory is temporary. "The feeling that life is for the living hasn't been lost out here the way it has in the United States and Europe," said Richard Ormond, a John Singer Sargent scholar and the painter's grandnephew, who's been coming to Connemara from England since the 1950s. "I think it's to do with the isolation. But now there's a possibility of an airstrip. Then you need a golf course and a five-star hotel, and then you've killed the goose with the golden egg."

Later, as Sinead and I drove home, I was reminded of the ashling that Michael Gibbons talked about and was struck by the immutability of a place. It was ten o'clock, but the sun was still up, and in its pale yellow light the mountains looked wild and alive, like the back of a great, green dinosaur. More than a century ago, this was where the rest of Ireland came to find its Gaelic roots, and the landscape hasn't changed a jot since. Which was why tonight, at a dinner party full of successful professionals, people described coming here to be fed by something more satisfying than prosperity. "I think a lot of us are going to stop in a few years and realize we've lost our core," Sinead said. "I find mine walking in those mountains.".