We traverse the meandering road between Castlebar and Achill Sound in perfect, inky darkness. It's late November, but the sky is clear and full of stars, boding well, we hope, for tomorrow. Before crossing to the island (via the Michael Davitt Bridge - Achill has been connected to the mainland since 1888, but just try telling a local that ergo it's no longer an island), we stop for something to eat at the hotel in Achill Sound. There, I overhear a passionately wistful conversation between two men, one an islander, returned from exile for a brief holiday, the other a regular visitor. Together, they keen at length about how the island has been destroyed by unwise and criminal construction in the shape of holiday homes that have blistered up across the landscape over the years.

"It's a tragedy," they chime in chorus, depressing Simon and I about the prospects for our story before we've even started it. We drive on, over the bridge and through a landscape that, in the darkness, looks lumpy and unremarkable, towards the island's northernmost town, Dugort, where we find accommodation at the Slievemore Hotel. When we set out the next morning, in bright, slanting winter sunshine, we are literally staggered by what surrounds us.

As a first-time visitor, nothing has prepared me for the views we encounter during that day - I had no idea the place was going to be this grandly spectacular. Achill's landscape is utterly unique, an odd combination of great, bulky mountains, sweeping boglands, the most snaggled and battered shoreline, perhaps, in the whole country, open Atlantic, beautiful beaches and dizzyingly steep sea cliffs, the highest, in fact, in all of Europe. The light on this chill winter's day is crystal clear, remarkable, but as the day progresses clouds arrive and a strange phenomenon occurs: where it might be raining and gloomy where we are, it's clear and sunny 500 yards away. It's as though the island is experiencing three or four different types of day all at once. This, I am later told, is typical of Achill's ever-changing meteorology. Having careered up and down the coast so Simon can take his pictures, we stand at the top of Minaun, one of Achill's three great mountains, and from our vantage point several thousand feet above the sea, enjoy a clear view right across the island. The sun is out again, and the palette of autumnal colour across the landscape is amazing, 20 shades from bright yellow into the deep liquid brown of the bogs.

But what about the holiday homes, the ones that have destroyed the island? Around Keel and Dooagh in particular, I see what our keening friends were referring to, where cramped groups of white holiday homes have sprawled outwards, distorting the traditional structure of the villages. But destroyed the island? I'm afraid I can't quite see it, and the magnificence of this place seems to me to be pretty much unimpaired. But the holiday home phenomenon has certainly had a big impact on the island, and by no means a uniformally positive one. More on that later. "We know for sure that this island has been inhabited since pre-Viking times," school-teacher and community activist, Sile McHugh tells me, "but there have probably been people here for a lot longer than that. The people who did all that research down in Ceide Fields have said they'd love to come out to Achill, because they reckon they'd find settlements even older here, going back 5000 years." Nothing is known, however, of these possible earliest Achill islanders, and the first historical reference to the place is in the seventh century, when the island formed part of the ancient Celtic territory of Umhaill, which was centered around Clew Bay. The island has always been steeped in folklore, Tir na Nog, the land of the ever-young, was traditionally supposed to have appeared in the sea off Achill every seven years. Saint Patrick may well have visited the island, and it's even possible that the mountain he climbed to fast and pray on for 40 days and nights was not Croagh Patrick, on the mainland, but Croaghaun, on Achill.

Saint Dympna certainly did visit, fleeing the attentions of her demented father. She built a church at the southern end of the island, at a place now known, after her, as Kildownet, before taking off again for Belgium. A lady of a very different character later built a castle nearby. Grainne Ni Mhaille, or Grainne Uaile, the famous 16th century pirate and sea queen, who fought off the English and went to London to parley on equal terms with Elizabeth I, often stayed in the castle that still stands at Kildownet, though her base was further south, on Clare Island. Grainne's clan, the O'Malleys, battled for possession of Achill with a group of other prominent families, including the Butlers, Bourkes and O'Connors, from the 13th to the 17th centuries. After Cromwell's victories, there was a major influx onto the island of Catholic families from the north of the country. Achill remained a remote and wholly Irish-speaking community throughout the 19th century, with no roads or infrastructure, and a sea-based population that fished and subsistence-farmed to make ends meet. Potatoes formed a large part of the local diet, particularly in the winter months when the seas were often too rough to fish, and so the island was devastated by the famine.

There are many famine graves around the church at Kildownet, and the famous deserted village, on a hillside near the western shore, may well have been abandoned during the 1840s. The terrible privations of the Famine among the islanders was partly alleviated by a remarkable and controversial figure in Achill's history. Dr. Edward Nangle, a minister of the Methodist Church who had arrived on the island to set up a mission in the 1830s. An Irish speaker, he aimed to use the language to convert Catholics to his faith, but that was not his only mission. He seemed genuinely moved by the poverty and unimaginable hardship of local life, though his response to it seemed to take the form of education rather than alms-giving. He set up a walled settlement at Dugort, which became known, and is still known, as the Colony, and from here, surveyed the squalor of Achill life. "It is a distressing sight," he wrote, "when walking through the villages of this island to see children, dogs, pigs and poultry congregated at the doors, or basking in the sun, all receiving the same education." To combat this lamentable situation, he built mission schools around the island, to which the dogs, pigs and poultry were not admitted, and in which the emphasis was on all things Protestant, and British. However, Sile McHugh believes "the man has got a lot of bad press. You hear a lot about him having tried to convert the islanders to the Protestant faith, but people forget about the positive things he did. For instance, the National School system was only started here because of the antagonism between him and Archbishop McHale. And tourism really started with him, through the publicity he generated for the island through his newspaper, the Achill Herald. The first tourists came here because of that."

Like much of the western seaboard, Achill fell victim during the 19th century to the drain of emigration, though this was mitigated to an extent by seasonal migration, where men would go working in Scotland and England during the winter months and return to fish and farm at home in the summer. This continued until well into the 1970s, as Michael Gielty, owner of the Clew Bay guest house and pub in Dooagh, remembers. "We used to go over and work on the farms in Scotland," he tells me, "and then, in the 1950s, when the Sellafield Nuclear Station came along, we went and worked in that. There were about a hundred Achill Islanders working in that place when I was there. It came out years later that there was a leak there in 1956, when we were there, but we never heard about it." Even in the 1950s, when Michael first left, Achill was still a remote place, and islanders were ill-prepared for what awaited them in the outside world. "I never saw a double-decker bus till I went to Dublin," Michael remembers, "never saw a train except in a cowboy film, and we had no tellies then. When we went away, we'd be last into the queue in the restaurants to see where the knives and forks were and to see what you'd do with them. And you'd never go into the posher restaurants, you always went into the rougher ones - you felt you were below those people. That's all changed now, thank God."

During July and August, when Achill enjoys an unreliable respite from Atlantic winds and rain, the island's permanent population (somewhere around the 2,800 mark) swells by up to three times, as tourists descend to enjoy the long western days and the incomparable scenery. But it's hard to sustain businesses on two months a year, no matter how good those two months are. Thankfully, however the season has begun to extend a bit of late. Achill has become very popular at Christmas, and the place was positively packed last year for New Year. "The island was really busy," remembers Michael Gielty, "and a few days before New Year's Eve, a rumour started going around that, with all the holiday homes in use and all the electrical equipment that was being used, there mightn't be enough power for the island on the night. And sure enough, at about half past nine on the night, with the bar jammed, it went - no light, no coolers, no cash registers... We coped, though."

A fair number of tourists come into the Clew Bay Bar specifically to ask Michael about one of his former professions, that of shark fisherman. "It happened like this," he tells me, from behind the counter of his bar. "We used to fish for salmon down there in Keem Bay for years, and one time a few of big basking sharks swam into the nets and got stuck." Basking sharks, which can grow up to 35 feet in length but mercifully feed exclusively on plankton, are hunted for their huge livers, which yield valuable oil. They were very plentiful along the Achill coastline, and, in the late 1950s, the islanders began to hunt them systematically - from curraghs. "We would set up nets, and sit in currachs in seven or eight feet of water, in Keem Bay, and wait for them. When they swam into the net, we'd use the spears on them. We'd come back every spring for it, from April to June, and it got to be a great industry, employing maybe 250 - 200 fishing and the rest processing around on the mainland. The most fish I remember we caught in a day was 32 sharks taken by six men in a crew, and there were days where there could have been 120 to 150 sharks caught down there in Keem Bay." Sadly, the population of sharks began to dip disastrously. "The big fishing was in the late 60s," says Michael. "It went well for ten or 12 years, and then they started to get scarce. We didn't know in the 50s and 60s that they'd get scarce - we thought there'd be plenty there for everyone. But when I think of it now, I'd hate to see them ever being hunted again because they're harmless. They're starting to make a comeback now, and it's lovely to see the odd one now and then." The last basking shark to be hunted commercially off the island was in 1984, for the benefit of an English TV documentary film crew.

Clockwise from top;
Roger Gallagher in The Valley House, former shark fisherman Michael Gielty, and Sile McHugh with her Junior Cert class.

Most commercial fishing may be at an end, but Achill is something of a Mecca for anglers. The Valley House, midway between Bull's Mouth and Dugort, is one of their most popular bases, and it's also probably the most interesting house on the whole island. The rather grand building is now a homely hostel with a small, charming bar at the rear founded by Roger Gallagher, and now run by his son Pat, but it was once the home of a Mrs. Agnes McDonnell, who fell foul of a notorious local character named the Lynchehaun. After failing disastrously at a series of jobs around Ireland, he returned to Achill in the early 1890s, where he got a job at the house as Mrs. McDonnell's land steward. A hot-tempered and intensely bitter man, the Lynchehaun always seemed to be at war with someone, and it wasn't long before he and his employer fell out. He demanded she promote him to land agent, but she thought him unsuitable, and refused. After a particularly bad argument, she fired him, a decision she was to regret, however, because he appears to have taken his dismissal rather badly. He began to drink heavily, and on October 6th, 1894, he tried to burn the place down, apparently severely disfiguring Mrs. McDonnell in the process. "I remember my grandmother talking about seeing her in the street in Westport," Roger Gallagher tells me, "and saying how you'd stand in the street to look at her she was so beautiful. But afterwards, half her face was covered, she looked terrible." Following his arrest, the Lynchehaun managed to escape, and jumped ship for America. There, the authorities refused to extradite him on the dubious grounds that his crime had been political. Much later, a book called The Playboy and. the Yellow Lady was written, loosely based on the story, and a film was also made, though a love story of sorts had been added. "There was no love story," however, Roger Gallagher reckons. When she died, in the 1940s, her son, Leslie, took the place over. He wanted to sell it, but not, for obvious reasons, to an islander. He knew Roger's mother well, and persuaded her to buy it. And so Roger pitched up at the end of the 40s, aged 19, and turned the old house into a hotel. In the 50-odd years since, he's seen the island change dramatically. "The population is under 3000 now - it was over 5000 when I got here, though at that time all the migratory workers who came and went were included in the census too. In those days, everyone had their own vegetable plots, and a few cows, and they fished too. But they totally overfished the waters around here. I remember when the water used to be boiling with fish."

Another big change, of course, has been the sudden appearance of all those holiday homes, a phenomenon many islanders are unhappy about. "All those holiday homes all over the place, on the side of mountains and everywhere," says Michael Gielty. "That was a stupid idea, whoever came up with it. You know we have this famous deserted village there up on the hill - well the other night, one of the boys said to me, 'there's new deserted villages now, three or four of them." "The village structure here is unique," says Sile McHugh, "and when you have these housing estates, a lot of houses built in a small area, it's just not natural to this environment. It happened very quickly, too, because the island came within the tax incentive area for seaside resorts, and it was only for a limited period, and unfortunately, the people who availed of the scheme were not necessarily local people, because they couldn't afford to buy the land. And what happened then was that the value of the land just sprang up, so that young locals who wanted to settle here simply couldn't afford to. So I think the development was quite detrimental to rural communities in a way. All that work and you have these houses lying empty..." It's easy to see why the developments have angered islanders, but Roger Gallagher is less pessimistic about the long term effects of Achill's holiday homes. "I'm the odd one out here, because everyone's saying the island is ruined, but it's a big island now, 24 miles long, and 12 or 15 miles wide... Have these cottages made any real impact on that? I don't think so. It's just a speck on this island, and I'm not worried about it." Sitting on Keem Beach in the November sunshine, with the bulky shoulder of Croaghaun to my right, sea cliffs to my left, and an empty, boggy valley at my back, I have to say I think I agree with him.

The Valley House