Our quest began on the remote isle of Inishmaan, a lonely six-square-mile nub of limestone inhabited by fewer than 200 souls. Tiny Inishmaan is in the center of the Aran Islands, a windswept mini-archipelago that the contemporary poet Seamus Heaney once called "the three stepping stones out of Europe." A century or so earlier, the Irish poet and playwright J. M. Synge found his own literary inspiration here among the islanders, whose simple life he described as "perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe."

At first glance, little appears to have changed on Inishmaan since Synge lived here. Our first day, we set off on a three-mile hike from the island's ferry pier through An Cora, the main village, and up to the ruins of Dún Fearbhaigh, the 3,000-year-old Iron Age fort that looms over the village. We wind our way up narrow cobbled paths through a maze of mortarless stone walls built and rebuilt by generations of islanders to shield their sheep and potatoes from unrelenting winds. We pass rows of overturned curraghs, boats that Aran fishermen have used for centuries to fish and trap lobsters. These days the lobsters are caught and flown straight to Paris's finest restaurants.

As we walk, I graze on ripe wild blackberries while attempting to make sense of signs that appear only in Gaelic, the ancient Celtic tongue that remains the lingua franca of Inishmaan and most of Connemara. (One faded pub sign reads is fearrde thú guinness—"Guinness is good for you.") Back in Synge's day, says Michael, "English was a language you'd only talk to a pig or a dog in." Given the way some of the locals eye us as they say hello, I suspect not much has changed.

Back in An Cora, we run into Tarlach de Blacam, a dapper ex-Dubliner in his mid-fifties who runs a shop selling the islands' famous fine knits. Tarlach came to Inishmaan more than 35 years ago to study Gaelic, fell in love with the place, and decided to stay forever. "Back then it was dark," he recalls fondly. "No electricity. Just the flickering of fires and candles." Only toward the end of our conversation do we learn that his shop is just the showroom for a profitable export business, Inis Meáin Knitting Company (Inis Meáin being the Gaelic spelling for the island). "I'm off to New York tomorrow to meet with Saks Fifth Avenue," he adds casually as he shakes hands and rushes to catch the ferry.

Following a night of drinking and good craic (pronounced "crack" but translated as harmless Irish "fun") at Teach Ostan Inis Meáin, one of the island's two pubs, I go about repairing my liver the Irish way: with a binge breakfast of sausages, rashers (bacon), eggs, and black pudding, a congealed pig's-blood product cleverly disguised as another sausage. Afterwards, a ferry shuttles us back to the mainland—a few pounds heavier than when we arrived.

Three hours later we find ourselves climbing hills and sloshing through peat bogs near Maam Cross, a crossroads ten miles south of the coast. The area was made famous as the setting for the 1952 John Wayne classic The Quiet Man. The skeletal ruins of long-abandoned cottages and remnants of old potato furrows fill the landscape. "Believe it or not," says Michael, "this was once one of the most densely populated parts of Europe—before the famine hit," referring to the devastating potato blight that claimed more than half a million lives and sent boatloads of emigrants to America between 1845 and 1850.