If Doolin has founding fathers in its musical sense, they were the three Russell brothers - Micho on the tin whistle, Packie on the concertina, Gussie on the flute. They grew up in this village. They played the local repertoire, much of it specific to west Clare and the surrounding parishes, and they kept playing through decades when most rural musicians in Ireland were drifting away from traditional forms. Visiting collectors and musicians began arriving in Doolin in the 1960s and 1970s to hear them, and what those visitors heard reshaped the wider Irish folk revival.

Micho Russell died in 1994, but the Micho Russell Festival Weekend has been held in Doolin every February since, a gathering of musicians from across Ireland and beyond to play sets together in the pubs. The Russells are buried in the local churchyard. Their tunes are still in active circulation in sessions in O'Connor's, McGann's, and McDermott's on most evenings of the year. Sharon Shannon, the accordionist, has played here. So has the piper Davy Spillane. Steve Wickham of the Waterboys is a regular. The village population is small. The audience is global.

Gus O'Connor's, in Fisher Street, was founded in 1832. McDermott's in Roadford dates to 1867. McGann's, next door to McDermott's, opened in 1976. Fitzpatrick's at Fitz's Cross is newer - 2006. The four pubs run sessions on a rotation that covers almost every night of the week. The bar staff know which fiddlers will play which sets. The crowd knows when to be quiet for a slow air and when to clap on the offbeat.

Not far from the harbour, the restaurant Homestead Cottage won a Michelin star in 2023 - which surprised some Doolin regulars who had been eating there for years without realising they were eating Michelin food. The village has grown around its tourism: hostels for backpackers, B&Bs for families, hotels for the package coaches. Crab Island sits a short distance offshore, barren now except for the remains of an early-nineteenth-century stone coastguard post.

In 1952 cavers exploring the Aille River cave system, which runs beneath the limestone of the Burren just inland from Doolin, came up against something none of them expected. A single calcium-carbonate spike, 7.3 meters long, hung from the ceiling of a chamber. The Doolin Cave website calls it the longest free-hanging stalactite in the Northern Hemisphere - tube-thin, slightly translucent, the slow drip of millennia frozen into geometry.

The public can visit, in groups of twenty maximum per tour, the limits imposed by conservation rules. The chamber lights up briefly when the guide hits the switch, and you see the formation from below: a thread of mineral suspended over a polished cave floor, fragile enough that a fingertip's touch could shorten it. The cave is one of dozens that lace the Burren limestone underground - water has been working on this stone for ten thousand years since the last ice retreated, dissolving its slow tunnels through the karst.

Doolin Pier is the busiest pleasure-boat harbour on this stretch of coast. Ferries run from here to the Cliffs of Moher (a 45-minute viewing trip at the cliff base), to Inis Oirr, and onward to Inis Meain and Inis Mor in the Aran Islands. The Irish Coast Guard maintains a station at the pier - this is the Atlantic, and the boats do not always come back when they planned to. Just offshore, beyond Crab Island, breaks Aill na Searrach, the Cliff of the Foals - the same wave that surfers call Aileens, ten meters high on big days, broken right at the foot of the Cliffs of Moher.

The village serves as base camp for several other things: the major limestone climbing area at Ailladie, eight kilometers away, where most routes start at British E1 5b and go up from there; the Burren Way long-distance walking trail; the bird-watching seasons at the cliffs. The Aran Islands ferry route to Inis Oirr is just 40 minutes - close enough that you can see the smallest Aran Island from the harbour on a clear morning. The 2007 PlayStation 3 game Folklore set its entire plot in Doolin, imagining the village as the only place in the world where the dead could be reached. Gaelic Storm has a fiddle tune called The Devil Went Down to Doolin. Most nights, in one of the four pubs, you can hear someone play it.