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'What fine weather you've brought,' marvelled the old-timer. A friendly cliche anywhere else, but on the little ferry to Ireland's fabled Aran Islands his words sounded almost literal, as if I might have magically broken the spell of winter and brought spring to these sparse but lovely rocks on Europe's far rim.

The Aran Islands have been causing visitors to come over all mystical ever since the playwright J.M. Synge waxed lyrical about the place in the early 1900s. Slung like a necklace across Ireland's Galway Bay, Inishmore ('the big island'), Inishmaan ('the middle island') and Inisheer ('the little island') are the stuff of Gaelic epic, evoking a hardy people swathed in superstition, eking a living from unyielding fields and widow-making seas. The ferry's cargo, catering containers of Hellman's mayonnaise, stacks of disposable coffee cups, duvets and paint pots, suggested the modern truth might be rather more banal. These days, the ferries can drop as many as 2,000 day-trippers at Kilronan on Inishmore, the islands' main settlement, in the height of the season. As tourism discovers the islands, so the islanders have taken to easier livings running bike hire shops, B&Bs and tour buses to Dun Aengus, the great cliff-top fortress that is the islands' best known attraction.

No matter; there were dolphins breaking surface like millwheels in the ferry's bow wave and a mother humming a Gaelic lullaby to her child. Despite the changes, the haunting quality of the islands, treeless bastions of Irishness littered with ancient fortresses, early chapels and clochans (long houses) has proved remarkably durable.

And nowhere more so than reticent Inishmaan, which has always looked askance at the mainland and even at the comparative bustle of its neighbouring islands. Over the years, Inishmaan's population has haemorrhaged; the island's quay, poignantly named An Cora or 'hope chest' after the luggage of departing families, testifies to the scale of emigration that the island has suffered.

The islands loomed through the haze, great limestone ramps rising to cliffs that face the swell of the ocean on their westerly side. Closer, we could see the tiny fishing ports that huddle on the islands' lee sides. The ferry dropped us at An Cora, where a few currachs, traditional longboats with tar-covered canvas hulls, lay upturned like beached whales, before steaming on towards Inishmore. We followed the island's one road, a nibbled ribbon of tarmac dividing a patchwork of tiny fields hemmed by immaculate dry-limestone walls, to Angela Faherty's B&B. Angela, from mainland Roscommon, met her Inishmaan husband in Boston and moved to the island twenty years ago.

“Most of our visitors are anthropologists, bird watchers and ramblers,” Angela explained over dinner. “The islanders don't want hordes of day-trippers like they get on the other islands.”

The next morning, we set out to explore a world apart. We followed a track through a patchwork of fields no larger than squash courts. Most contained a sloping stone ramp the size of a double bed that fed precious rainwater into the trough at its foot. In one field a woman wearing a brightly patterned shawl crouched over a calf that had been born in the night, murmuring Gaelic reassurances. The drystone walls that enclosed the fields were patterned as variously and beautifully as the island's famous woollen sweaters (whose own designs, it is said, evolved to help women identify their washed-up fisherman husbands and so confirm their widowhood). In some stretches, the stones were arranged horizontally, in others vertically or even in a herringbone, the different patterns indexing ancient ownership of the land. There were whitewashed cottages topped by great wig thatches that had been secured by hairnets of blue and red scraps of fishing net to wooden poles that protruded beneath the eaves.

The fields gave way to great rinks of moonscape limestone terraces, which were freakishly flat and sea-swept clean bar the odd car-sized rectangle of rock that some unimaginable tumult had dumped there. Sheer cliffs fell seawards where seals bobbed, their heads resembling tarred footballs in the surf. The path led to Synge's Chair, a stone bivouac where the playwright had come during protracted stays on the island, and thence to the island's one village, comprising a shop, a magnificent pub, a post office, a church and a straggle of houses where women were fertilizing their kitchen gardens with seaweed collected from the beach.

“Try an Inishmaan spud,” as Angela Faherty put it, “and you'll taste the sea, surely you will.”

We had arranged to be on that afternoon's flight to Inishmore. “The plane won't go without you,” Angela reassured us back at her B&B as we looked at our watches. Angela explained that her husband was the airport's fire officer, without whom nothing took off, and he would be a while yet with his lunch. The tiny airport building's other employee doubled as air traffic control, ticket issuer and check-in, which meant weighing passengers and baggage on a pair of bathroom scales. Rabbits nibbled at the runway. The nine-seater plane skimmed low across Gregory Sound to touch down at Inishmore after a three-minute flight.

We hired bikes at Kilronan, and cycled along the road to the village of Killeany at Inishmore's little visited eastern end. We left our bikes at the end of the track and wandered across an unearthly landscape of rocks and occasional green swards to the cliffs on the island's south side. Dun Ducathair, the Black Fort, stood on a dizzying promontory high above the sea. One of a number of remarkable iron-age fortifications on Aran, Dun Ducathair was wild, elemental, spray-drenched and deserted. We had come to Europe's very edge; and at places like Dun Ducathair, it was as if we had fallen off into another world entirely.

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