In the good old days, when travelling with the Irish team was an exercise in adventure and romance, there used to be a little joke which bore frequent repetition any time the great Con Houlihan went missing.

Con liked to explore places and see things apart from the airport and the room service waiter. He liked to leaven his lovely prose with mention of these things. Mainly, he liked and knew about nature (all right, he liked and knew about the odd tincture, too, but nature was in there with a shout before it got dark on any given day).

So when Con would vanish on a ramble and the person with responsibility for herding the hacks on to the bus would inquire where he had got to, we would say that he'd gone to the "rent-a-mallard" shop, because even in the most blighted urban environment Con could begin a piece with mention of some birdlife he'd spotted amidst the flotsam on a park pond.

Well, Con would be in his element here on these islands where the sweetest of Kerry's beautiful streams and epic coastlines meet the most rugged and muscular of Connemara's landscapes, and the skies present a light show that is a constant battle for supremacy between the colours of blue, grey, orange and black.

The winds are so persistent the locals seem bred for bending into them. If the gales stopped blowing everybody would fall over. The towns are small and picturesque, like Donegal fishing places but more colourful, with tall house-fronts painted in primary colours and high, steep roofs tiled in orange and red or, most intriguingly, insulated with a lawn of grass.

The seas and rivers have such abundant fishing that a man could trail his hand in the swell and come out with his dinner. Sheep outnumber people two to one, and little wonder: most of the land is made up of rocky spits which humans have tunnelled through but which the woollybacks roam freely over. And the birdlife starts with the common or garden puffin and works its way out from there to over 200 species. The rent-a-mallard franchise never got off the ground.

Not that it didn't have time. There have been people living on this grey, 18-piece archipelago since AD 825, and if the beauty is seductive to the visitor the prospect of scraping out a living here is so remote that it produced two unlikely statistics. The Faroes gave birth to the oldest parliament in Europe, but Tórshavn remains the smallest capital city in the world.

Of course, despite the absence of EU handouts and the benefits of a big market or a booming tourist industry, there are areas in which the Faroe Islanders put us to shame.

The network of roads and tunnels (16 of them, running for miles and miles) which run around the country, through mountains and under seas, is as incredible as the scenery. Their fishing industry is a model. And the local sense of independence and cultural self-reliance strikes one everywhere. And, wonder of wonders, there's a full signal on the mobile phones, even in the dark centre of a five-mile tunnel through a cliff face.

They'll be otherwise engaged at the time, but on Wednesday evening, when the excursions go, fans of Roy K might like to visit one of the oldest continuously inhabited spots on the island. People have lived for 900 years in Roykstovan.

Everywhere you look there is some quiet or splendid wonder demanding your attention. Even the air advertises its difference and superiority as you suck it in. And among the wonders are a football team drawn from the 48,000 islanders, a team who just about manage to hold their own in World Cup competition.

There are some dullards (wherever you go you're never far from a rent-a-dullard shop) who would take trips like this off the world soccer menu and retain the possibility of qualification or true competition only for the large nations.

This, they say, is Mickey Mouse. Trips like these, they argue, are beneath the dignity of the soccer aristocracy.

What a load of old puffins. We'd all be the poorer and all be the smaller. When Roy and Duffer and the lads step out in the little ground here in Tórshavn tomorrow night, soccer will be a world game in the truest sense.