FESTIVAL DIARY:At Scoil Acla, the music has a resonance that is carried across the waves to foreign shores, writes MICHAEL HARDING

LAST THURSDAY evening, I had a toasted cheese sandwich in Ted Lavelle’s bar. I was attending Scoil Acla, the music summer school on Achill Island.

A flute player touched my shoulder.

“I haven’t seen you since the day we met in Drumshanbo,” he said, “the year I ate the rope” – meaning the year he separated from his wife.

The bar was full of men in working boots, drinking pints and watching the races from Galway.

In the lounge, children with musical instruments were getting ready for a competition called Hata Acla. I hadn’t a clue what Hata Acla meant, but the flute player explained.

“Once upon a time there was a special hat in Achill,” he said. “It hung on a post near the mainland. If anyone was heading away, and had no hat of their own, they could take this hat, as they were going off the island, and return it when they came back.”

A lovely myth – as if Achill was a little family in a little house, and the road around the world was only a day’s walk, and anyone could be home before dark.

In the lounge, two microphone stands were arranged on a small stage. Two girls with their hair parted on the right side, and clipped on the left with pink hairclips in an old-fashioned style, played concertina and whistle; the softness of their hornpipes was unbearably beautiful. Another contestant had tied a cuddly toy to the neck of her harp for good luck.

A boy in a Mayo jersey gulped Lucozade from a bottle at his feet before he delivered a song his grandmother might have sung as she washed her sheets, or his grandfather might have lilted while making nets.

When the recession bites, the children of Achill may be forced to hang their hats in far-off lands, and hold this music in their hearts, as they ride the subways through grim worlds they have not yet imagined.

A German woman gave me directions to Dugort. As a child, she had to travel eight hours to find the sea.

“But I live in Achill now,” she said, and smiled as only those in love can smile.

I headed west, towards Croaghaun mountain, and the finest cliffs in Europe.

I passed a church where 30 years ago three young boys were taken from the sea, and laid out in coffins, side by side, as a bishop sprinkled holy water on the oak lids, and relations outside hugged the hearses and wailed their sorrow at the sky.

I zigzagged around the whitewashed walls of Toblerone holiday houses and through a desolate bog, where a cluster of Traveller vans and trailers were tucked away from the wind, far away from the gaze of settled folk.

Finally, I arrived beneath the slopes where, 60 years ago, an RAF plane crashed in thick fog, killing the eight servicemen on board; bits of the engines remain up there, still sinking into the earth.

I parked near where the ditches of fuchsia enfold the rusting gates of the Church of Ireland, and walked up to the old schoolhouse on the hill, where people were assembled to hear a writer reading from his books.

But books are ephemeral on the side of a mountain where the rocks are 700 million years old, a mountain that was carved by ice in the likeness of the Holy Reek. A mountain that may even be the remnant of an ancient continent, which was lost forever beneath the waves in prehistoric times, and which sank into myth, to become the island of Hybrazil.

In Gielty’s Bar later, a circle of musicians, young and old, sat in the corner, rattling out tunes and songs that will continue to be sung for many more years, when the old singers that walk now are dead and gone, and the young ones are turning grey in the suburbs of American cities.

The next morning, a plumber in a blue van, copper piping lashed to the roof, dropped his daughter off at the school for the workshops. She struggled across the windy yard, and up the steps with her fiddle case.

The wind was hammering the New Zealand flax on the ditches.

A woman looked wistfully on and said: “I have a daughter in America, but she is illegal. She can never come home. On Patrick’s Day, when the bands from all the villages are assembled in Achill, I do call her, and hold my mobile phone up in the air, so that the sound of the pipes and drums can travel across the ocean to her apartment in Boston, where she hangs her hat and makes a home. She loves to hear the music from Achill.”