For one couple, making perfume in the isolated Burren is more a way of life than a business, writes Mary Sweetman. Photos: Joe O'Shaughnessy.

Carron is a tiny village, halfway down a back road, right in the middle of nowhere: 15 kilometres in either direction from the nearest petrol station, even further from a bank machine, and about as close in Ireland as you can get to isolation. The most amazing thing about the place is the silence that hits you like a wall the minute you switch off your car radio and open the door. It's everywhere, bouncing off the early summer sky and reverberating on the limestone-poured Burren landscape.

Before her first visit there, 15 years ago, Sadie Chowen was a committed city-dweller, a part of the global, buzzing, happening, teeming life that was 1980's London.

"I remember getting off the plane about nine o'clock one night in May", she says. "I had been living in London for 10 years and was right in the middle of buying a flat there. But, as we drove across the Burren, I had the strangest feeling, I thought 'this is it; this is where I want to be'. Three months later, I bought a cottage here, a little ruin, and that was it."

With her partner, Edward Biggs, Sadie now runs the Burren Perfumery, which is as much a part of the fabric of Carron as its green fields and stone walls. "During the foot-and-mouth controls last year, you could see how extraordinarily tight-knit everything is. If one business goes down, people lose their jobs, there is not as much money around and it has a real knock-on effect on everything else", she says. "That's what's special about the Perfumery. It's about the Burren and its unique plants and flowers, and we're employing local people. So you have a real connection with the place."

Aside from the sense of connection, you can tell the Perfumery suits her style: floral with offbeat chic, and principled in an organic, no-artificial-preservatives type of way. And like the London girl who grew up in the South of France, it has a French connection.

The Perfumery was started15 years earlier, when Brian Mooney, a friend of Edward's father, returned from the little hilltop town of Grasse, just above Cannes on the French Riviera.

Once the centre of the global perfume industry, 100 or even 50 years ago, Grasse's valleys were covered with the acres of lavender, roses and jasmine needed to feed the petal hungry perfume houses of France.

Today, animals graze the fields, and flowers and spices are bought in from Bulgaria, Turkey and Madagascar. Or, more usually, their essences are simulated, molecule-by-molecule, in giant chemical synthesis plants. But Grasse still holds its position in the billion dollar French perfume industry, and it is still where the "noses" of the perfume business - people like Brian Mooney - come to perfect their art.

The unique flora of the Burren - the juxtaposition of arctic, alpine and Mediterranean plants, all thriving in its lonely isolation - made Mooney choose Carron as his base. "Back then, local people thought he was mad," Sadie says. "You didn't get that many tourists round here, and nobody could understand what he was trying to do."

Mooney restyled himself Vincent, and early on he was astute enough to get Aer Lingus to carry his fragrances - classics such as Man of Aran - in their duty free range. But, says Sadie, "he was more of an artist. He loved the distillation and the chemistry and couldn't really be bothered with a lot of the business side of things."

When he retired eight years ago, Edward and Sadie took over and brought a more commercial focus to the operation, bringing the perfumes up to date, with lighter, more contemporary fragrances. Then, four years ago, they launched an aromatherapy range based on themes like "relaxation", with lemon and lavender oils, and "invigoration", with pine and rosemary extracts.

The alchemy that surrounded Vincent, though, remains. The shop-front has the feel of an old pharmacy, with its big bottles and vessels filled with coloured liquids and shelves of exotic fragrances and essences, all painstakingly labelled by hand.

Sadie and Edward have also stuck with the traditional method of perfume making, using only natural and, where possible, organic plant products. The essential oils are 100 per cent organic, and the aromatherapy products are 30 to 50 per cent organic, depending on what's available. This practice, they say, has all but died out everywhere. "There might be a few artisans in France, and maybe florists in England who still take the trouble to do it properly, but mostly the perfumes you see on the shelves don't have anything natural in them".

Gathering the plants is Sadie's job. Protected Burren species, such as the Fragrant Orchid, are grown for them in mirrored habitats, but mosses, lichens, barks and all the more common plants, and some of the flowers are harvested from the wild, and an herb garden is stocked with native Irish herbs. Distillation is also Sadie's job. In a massive still out the back, the plants are fed in a massive, cauldron like basket, and heated from underneath, making the oils rise up as a steam, cool and fall again as a liquid that is tapped off and bottled.

Patience is needed for the next step. The oils must be refrigerated for six months before they can be blended, and this is where the skill comes in. "It's a bit like wine making, it varies from year to year. Some years, the oils are stronger than others, so you need to know what you're doing with the formulae to get exactly the same fragrance every year." These days, Edward is the nose - not an easy task when you consider that any one perfume consists of up to 30 to 40 separate essences. Sadie compares his job to that of an architect selecting from a range of building blocks to construct a pyramid, or a composer picking and choosing notes to create a symphony.

The summer is the busy season for the Perfumery. Harvesting and distillation intensifies, the workforce swells to seven and the tourist season is in full swing. About half the business is wholesale to tourist and craft shops in Ireland and the continent, and, via an agent, to North America. The other half is from people visiting the shop and repeat business by mail order and the Internet.

Visitors who make the trek out to Carron get to wander around the shop and herb garden. There's also a photographic and audiovisual exhibition on the flora and geology of the Burren, and plans for a tearoom. The whole thing only takes about half-an-hour, but there's a real charm about the place, and, on a sunny day, the drive from Ennis or Galway is stunning.

Tour buses, however, are strictly banned. You get the sense that this is mostly for practical reasons - there is not a lot of parking space - but you also get just the slightest whiff of elitism - the idea that the Perfumery is a special place that should be appreciated in calmness and serenity, and to which visitors should give their undivided attention.

"If they make the effort to get here themselves, then you know they actually want to be here," Sadie reasons. "And it's not really fair for people who have made the effort to come - some from quite far away - if they get swamped by a busload of 50, who just arrive because their tour operator had half an hour to kill in the schedule."

Like their decision to use only natural ingredients, this policy underlines that the Perfumery is more a way of life than a business to Edward and Sadie."We're here seven days a week, 51 weeks a year. It's a lifestyle, not something you can just do nine-to-five, so we have to really love what we do," Sadie confirms. "The downside is that it's difficult to get away together.

We do obviously, but not very often, because you don't know what's going to happen or go wrong when you're not around. But at the same time, if it's a sunny day and we're not too busy, I can just hop in the car and take my daughter down to the beach."

There are other compensations. Urban life hasn't been completely abandoned: small treats include weekly bouts of city in Galway or, more occasionally, Paris. But Carron is home. "You get used to it here. It's isolated in winter, and it rains a lot of the time. But then, suddenly, the wind changes and the sun comes out. Or it's the evening, and the light starts to change. That's very special."