What happened in 2017 was not magic - it was geomorphology. Beaches are reservoirs of sand that move constantly along the coast under the influence of waves, tides, and storms. A single severe storm can strip a beach in days, as happened in 1984. The right combination of unusually high tides and gentle weather can rebuild one almost as quickly, as happened in 2017. The story made global news partly because of the sheer visual drama - rocks one morning, golden sand the next - and partly because villagers who had grown up on the rocky foreshore suddenly had something to show their grandchildren. Tourism to Dooagh measurably increased that summer. Then early 2019 brought another storm, and the sand began to retreat again. Locals are now philosophical. The beach will return when it returns.

In the centre of Dooagh village stands a small monument to a man named Don Allum. In 1987, Allum rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean from west to east - completing a feat he had first attempted decades earlier, when he and a companion rowed the western crossing in 1971. He landed his boat, the QE3, at Dooagh in September 1987, becoming the first person ever to row across the Atlantic in both directions. The achievement was extraordinary, the route was brutal, and the choice of Dooagh as his finishing point was partly a matter of where the wind and current carried him. The monument is modest. Most visitors walking past in summer with ice creams do not stop. But for anyone who has ever looked out at the Atlantic from the west of Achill and tried to imagine its scale, the thought of one man with two oars crossing it - twice - is enough to make you reconsider what a human being can endure.

On the road from Dooagh up toward Lough Acorrymore stands Corrymore House. In the 1880s it was the home of a man whose name has since entered the English language. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent for absentee landlords in this part of Mayo, and in 1880 the local tenants - organised by the Irish Land League founded by Michael Davitt - refused to harvest his crops, refused to do business with him in shops, refused even to deliver his mail. The campaign of social ostracism worked. Boycott eventually fled Ireland in disgrace, and the word 'boycott' - the man's actual name - became a verb meaning exactly the tactic that had driven him out. Decades later, in 1924, the American painter Robert Henri bought the same house on the hill above Dooagh, having fallen in love with Achill on a series of summer visits during which he is said to have painted portraits of most of the children in the village.

Since 1910, the Irish traditional music summer school Scoil Acla has met every August in Dooagh. The painter Paul Henry - one of the most influential Irish artists of the early twentieth century, whose paintings of the Achill landscape helped fix the western seaboard in the national imagination - was an active member, and in 1912 he directed a production here of Casadh an t-Súgáin (The Twisting of the Rope), a play by Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic scholar who would later become Ireland's first president. The school went into decline mid-century but was revived in 1985 and has run continuously since. The Dooagh Pipe Band, founded in March 1947, is one of five pipe bands on Achill Island - a remarkable density for an island of fewer than 3,000 people. On any given summer evening, traditional music drifts out of Gielty's or Lourdie's pubs, and the village that lost its beach for 33 years carries on doing what it has always done.