The signs around the rough, makeshift pens announced that, because of foot-and-mouth disease, this was a biosecurity zone, writes Fintan O'Toole.

There were scraggly mats for disinfecting your feet at either end of the street off Killorglin's main square. But the stench hung over the whole town, and even in the other narrow streets you could see the marks of cattle dung smeared against the whitewashed walls.

The drovers and dealers were themselves wedged between the fences and the buzzing, garrulous pubs, whose open doors revealed the mix of sawdust, dung and spilt porter on the floors. Slimy mess seeped out from under the pens, giving the footpath the appearance of rocks coated with seaweed after the tide has receded. Biosecurity and Puck Fair don't really go together.

Down in the main square, beneath the tower that held King Puck aloft, a marvellous Breton ensemble called Bagad Sonerien Bro Dreger were performing.

They wore clean white shirts and blouses with black waistcoats and silver buttons, giving them a soberly uniform appearance. But the music of their bombardes and binious, the sharp rap of their drums, blared out with ecstatic swirls and insistent rhythms. If you closed your eyes, the music, with its medieval lilt and hypnotic repetitions, seemed like the soundtrack of one of those great Breughel paintings of bacchinalian village festivities, with drink in the belly and sex in the air. As if in acknowledgment of her surroundings, one of the younger Breton dancers wore a cheap cowboy hat she had obviously purchased at a stall in the fair. Its lurid green and pink patterns, set against the serious traditions of the music, summed up Puck Fair's strange mix of vulgarity and sacredness, of pagan memories and garish commercialism.

The travel writer Lesley Daiken, when he was commissioned to write a piece about the fair for Bord Fáilte's Ireland of the Welcomes magazine in the 1950s, was warned that he should "only stress those aspects of Puck Fair that are universally acceptable as attractions". The instructions hinted at the unease that has never quite been dispersed. Puck Fair is valued for its wildness, its exuberance, its vestiges of pre-modern anarchy. But for those very reasons, the fair that unfolds around a he-goat crowned by a virgin girl doesn't quite fit the bill as a tourist attraction.

It is, and has always been, essentially a Traveller fair. The horse fair, dominated by Traveller dealers, has now been placed in a field outside the town, but Travellers are still prominent on the streets of Killorglin, as traders and as revellers. They have now been joined by significant numbers of Roma women whose traditional costumes can seem, in this context, attractively folksy rather than signs of strange otherness. This is still a place where the fortune tellers advertise themselves as "genuine Romany gypsies" and expect that to be taken as a good thing.

In 1965, when she published her book on Puck Fair, Muriel Rukeyser called it simply The Orgy. She saw "a man with rats and ferrets running over his chest and back, and a contortionist tied in a knot of himself". She saw fierce fights. She noticed that the raffle being conducted at the foot of Puck's tower had a first prize of £60 or a trip to Lourdes. She noted "the high squealing sexual laughter at the bridge, the heavy wordless sounds, hot dogs in the square, the goat snug and dry under his own roof . . . bare-foot children following the piper".

The children are no longer barefoot and the man with the ferret is nowhere to be seen. But there are still collections to send a child to Lourdes, still fights, still sexual laughter. King Puck still looks down from his snug perch.

He sees the Hollywood sign on the ride in the fairground, the second-hand Black and Decker drills, the H-Block memorabilia, the flushed drinkers, the half-stunned American tourists, the punters swinging the test-your-strength hammer to impress their girlfriends, the gardaí ignoring the counterfeit DVDs, the woman selling signs that say "Feck Off", the farmers feigning outrage at the prices offered for their beasts.

He turns away and chews his hay serenely, glad to be above it all.