At the nightly music recitals in Milltown Malbay all this week, the tapping of the audience's feet is like a communal heartbeat.
The muffled thud of shoe leather on floorboards adds percussion to the performances of those selected to showcase their instruments during "Willie Week": fiddles on the Monday night, flutes and whistles on Tuesday, and so on through pipes, accordions and concertinas, until an all-star selection brings the curtain and the house down on Saturday.
If the foot-tapping really was a heartbeat, admittedly, the patient would have high blood pressure, since the pulse-rate rarely falls below 90 beats a minute and, on faster jigs, can reach well over a hundred. But in fact this is the sound of a tradition in good health. Despite the many things that might have killed it, and that threaten it still, Irish music continues to thrive.
There is no shortage of virtuosi to choose from here, so - especially on fiddlers' night - even the most illustrious of musicians are confined to playing only two or three tunes, just enough to demonstrate an interesting regional or personal style, and then leave the stage.
Martin Hayes, for example, takes an evening off from being a world-famous fiddle player to represent the east Clare style. This is said to be slower and more melancholic than the west Clare. And sure enough, the first of his contrasting pieces on Monday night was so lonesome it made the birds outside the Community Hall stop singing (I imagine so anyway).
Inside, the audience's feet ceased to tap as well. For a minute or two, it looked like the patient had flat-lined. But then Hayes administered his second piece - a playful, lilting reel - and the pulse resumed again, strong as ever.
The nightly recitals are the only concession to audiences during the Willie Clancy Summer School, which really is a school, with at least 1,200 students (including Jeremy Irons) enrolled for the week. The event is not so much a festival as an anti-festival. It doesn't depend on sponsorship from a drinks company, for one thing. When the organisers say they have "the harp" on board this year for the first time, it's classes in the instrument they mean, not the lager.
Also, although people do go to Milltown just to listen to the music, the event is not really set up for them. Apart from the Community Hall, the only venues you can go to hear music are pubs - some of which are so small that they can accommodate a music session or an audience, but not both.
And anyway, like the polar ice caps, the pubs are disappearing. This is not just a phenomenon of Milltown Malbay. The same thing is happening throughout rural Ireland. It's just more startling in a place that people return to, year after year, for the same week, and often to the same venues. In the past 12 months, Fahey's has disappeared, the last of six music venues that once stood on the now pub-free Ennis Road.
O'Connors in Mullagh - the nearby village that hosts many of the off-Milltown sessions - has melted too since last July, drifting away into the rising seas of an Ireland where small country pubs no longer fit. As a result, Willie Week musicians need to spread themselves around even more than they used to. The ripples of the event now extend in a radius of at least 10 miles around Milltown: to Ennistymon, Doolin, Doonbeg and beyond.
THE BIGGEST VENUE around Milltown is the aptly-named Armada Hotel, at Spanish Point, where armies of set-dancers gather daily to engage in manoeuvres with names such as "battering". Even here, a few musicians will mount sessions in corners, like flying columns sent out from the town. But this is mainly a set-dance stronghold and those of us with an aversion to dancing give it a wide berth.
Spanish Point took a battering in more ways than one in recent days, thanks to this comically bad summer. When you see the wind in action here, you can understand why West Clare is devoid of trees. And you can easily imagine the fate of the original Armada, for which Spanish Point is named, and which fell victim to another Irish summer (it was September, to be exact) 419 years ago.
The sailors who drowned when their ship went down off Doonbeg are said to haunt a beach there. But a few of their colleagues made it ashore alive, so they must haunt somewhere else. At any rate they were hanged by the High Sheriff of Clare, the extravagantly named Boetius McClancy, who for long afterwards was formally cursed at a religious service held periodically in Spain.
I thought of the Armada when trying to enter the "Cliffs of Moher Experience" on Monday and simultaneously attempting to deploy an umbrella against the rain, which was falling horizontally (if that's possible) from the direction of Inisheer. Thanks to the new lay-out of the interpretative centre, the car park is a considerable distance away, and even further in a westerly gale.
There is a drop-off area near the entrance, happily, where I safely deposited my family: counting them out of the car - "one-two-three-go!" - like they were making parachute jumps. But I had to negotiate the journey from the car-park on foot, and found that doing so while holding up an umbrella was quite impossible.
I tried tacking for a period until, 100 yards from the entrance, I realised there was nothing for it but to drop sail completely, or risk being dashed against the rocks. When I finally made it inside, soaked and breathless, I must say I enjoyed the Cliffs of Moher Experience. But for sheer white-knuckle thrills, the Walking-from-the-car-park-in-a-gale Experience just edged it.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie