These days, points out Michael, it's mostly cities like Dublin that are booming, thanks to the "Celtic Tiger," the nickname given to Ireland's raging economy, which, since the early nineties, has ranked among the fastest-growing in Europe. With the help of expats moving in from the United States and England to fill high-tech jobs at places like Dell, Intel, and Microsoft, Ireland's population tops four million for the first time since 1872.

As we stumble up a green hillside between Maam Cross and the village of Recess, Michael grabs my shoulder. "Careful, now, of the fairy tree!" I wipe rain from my glasses and scan the dense mist, half expecting to see a Lucky Charms look-alike flitting about. Instead there's a single wind-pummeled tree sprouting through moss and rocks on an otherwise barren hillside. "Locals will tell you fairies live under trees like that," says Michael. "They'll never cut one down, for fear of retribution. In some cases they've even diverted highways around them." In a country that's hurtling into modernity, I find it comforting to think that the placement of high-speed motorways can still be dictated by concerns of fairy displacement.

After two days of bog-tromping through lashing rain, we drag ourselves, dripping and hungry, into the Lough Inagh Lodge Hotel, a sprawling 125-year-old Tudor-style mansion nestled next to the Twelve Bens and Maamturks Mountains, just 42 miles west of Galway, and surrounded by some of the best fly-fishing streams in all of Europe. The rosy-cheeked lodge owner, showing true Irish hospitality, stuffs our wet boots with newspaper, sets them by the fire, and leads us into an oak-paneled pub decorated with a taxidermy zoo. "Slainte!" he says, offering up the traditional Gaelic toast along with a frothy pint of Guinness and a lunch of native smoked salmon on brown bread and a crabmeat-and-avocado salad.

A van whisks us from lunch westward to the port town of Cleggan, 30 minutes away, where we switch to a ferry and chug 40 minutes over gut-churning swells to arrive on Inishbofin, the "Island of the White Cow." We head off to catch the sunset over the Atlantic, walking a hillside through what Michael calls a "relic landscape." Three-thousand-year-old walls—half-submerged in fields of clover—lead to the doorsteps of what he identifies as the remains of ancient homes. "Welcome to your Bronze Age B&B!" he announces as we cross the lichen-covered threshold.

As we leave Connemara the next day and drive the 80 miles back to Shannon Airport, sheep meadows are replaced by Dunnes department stores and a billboard touts Guinness, with its 198 calories, as the hip, low-calorie beer of choice for the young, waistline-conscious Irish.

In my five days in Ireland, I never spotted a single donkey cart, and the only thatch cottages I encountered were on the verge of becoming archaeological. But what I found instead was a thriving, vital Ireland where ancient ways have found modern expression, where fairies are still a force to be reckoned with, and where the Guinness is just as good for you as it ever was.