The Atlantic warms Wexford with the North Atlantic Drift and shelters it from the rougher Atlantic weather that batters the western counties. January temperatures average around 4 degrees, July ones reach the high teens. Snow is rare on the coast - the Saltees, two limestone islands five kilometres off Kilmore Quay, almost never see it. Mount Leinster, visible across the inland half of the county from the Blackstairs Mountains, takes the winter snow that everywhere else here misses. Three hundred and seventy-five days of growing weather a year make Wexford strawberry country: the Strawberry Fair in Enniscorthy, every June, crowns a Strawberry Queen, and roadside stalls sell punnets of red fruit through the summer.

Wexford is haunted by 1798. The rising erupted here with particular ferocity, led by men like Father John Murphy at Boolavogue and the United Irishman Bagenal Harvey. Pikes from that rebellion are still on display at the County Carlow Military Museum. The rebels seized Wexford town, held it for three weeks, then lost it - and after defeat at Vinegar Hill in Enniscorthy, the slaughter was bitter. The county's traditional songs are heavy with that rebellion still. Paddy Berry, the All-Ireland Fleadh Champion, spent decades collecting them. Two great-grandparents of John F Kennedy left Dunganstown for Boston in the famine years; the JFK Homestead and arboretum sit in their old townland.

Hook Head lighthouse, on the long thin peninsula that ends in the cliffs of Hook Head, has been working in some form since the 12th century - one of the oldest operational lighthouses in the world. The lonely beach at Curracloe is where Steven Spielberg filmed the opening assault scenes of Saving Private Ryan; on a quiet morning the Wexford dunes still feel weirdly like Omaha in slow weather. Loftus Hall, halfway down the Hook, is said to be the most haunted house in Ireland - the first hall on the site was built in 1350, and the ghost stories have had time to accumulate. The Saltee Islands themselves once had a self-styled 'Prince Michael of the Saltees,' Michael Neale, who declared his own kingdom there in 1956 and built a small monument to himself near the landing.

Wexford has won the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship six times, most recently in 1996, beating Limerick in the final. Hurling matters here in the way the strawberry queen matters in Enniscorthy. So does opera. Since 1951 the Wexford Festival Opera has been bringing obscure operas to a small theatre in Wexford town each October - works that almost no other festival programs - and in 2008 a new National Opera House opened on the same site. Two theatres now, the O'Reilly and the Jerome Hynes. Colm Toibin grew up in this county. So did the novelist John Banville. Eoin Colfer wrote Artemis Fowl from here. Saoirse Ronan filmed Brooklyn in Enniscorthy. The county keeps producing writers and welcoming film crews, and the strawberries keep ripening between the dunes and the Blackstairs.

In the late 1970s the Irish government proposed building a nuclear power plant on Carnsore Point, the windswept southeast corner of the county. Protest concerts at Carnsore - Christy Moore, Donovan, Clannad - drew tens of thousands in 1978 and 1979 and helped sink the plan. The point now hosts a wind farm instead. Great Island Power Station, once oil-fired, now runs natural gas alongside a wind farm completed in 2002 - the first on the east coast. Wexford keeps voting against what it does not want, and keeps the wind blowing through the wires of what replaced it.