A late summer day’s racing across the sands of Béal Bán can haunt your winter with happy dreams. Around the end of August each year, the fledgling jockeys of the horse and pony circuit descend on this fabled white strand outside the village of Ballyferriter in West Kerry. They ride horses that tend to be either young and excitable or old and stubborn. They show the vivacious colours of their racing silks against skies that sit as often as not greyly over the mountains of the Dingle peninsula and the cold waters of Smerwick Harbour. This is horse racing in a pure, amateur form, and at a meeting like this you can’t help feeling it belongs to an older and better world than ours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dylan O’Connor, 10: ‘I’d always get out on a Saturday, but hopefully I’d be out in the week as well’

The young jockeys have about them an air of intensity and a sense of lasered focus that lifts them directly out of childhood and adolescence – you recognise at once that these are serious operators, and this is a serious game.

“I’m 10 years of age now,” says Dylan O’Connor from Liscarroll in County Cork, “but I started off with the horses when I was about two and a half.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel King, 14: ‘I think I had seven winners... I know I won the first five races’

He rode in just the one race at Ballyferriter last summer, but it went well enough. “I came in second, I was about two lengths back,” he says. “The horse was a fairly old fella, so he was grand, you know? You wouldn’t be nervous getting up on him at all.”

Whenever he gets the chance, and whatever the season, Dylan is away with the horses. “I’d always get out on a Saturday, but hopefully I’d be out in the week as well,” he says. “And at home I’d be watching it on the television a fair bit. I’d be looking out for jockeys like Jack Kennedy or Ruby.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danny Harnet, 16 (on left), and Jackie Mulvihill, 23. ‘I’m getting a bit heavy,’ Harnet says, ‘so I’ll get in as many rides as I can this year. I love the craic with the other jockeys’

In Ireland, the jockey Ruby Walsh tends to pass as a one-name entity; he is a key figure in the pantheon of native heroes for the young riders. And you have to start young – in truth, you’d want to be of veteran stock before secondary school to be seen as a real proposition. If you go well at the likes of Ballyferriter, the entire world of racing might open up to you. “You have to be 16 for the track racing,” Dylan says. “It’s definitely something I’d be thinking about.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mickey McGuane, 15: ‘I started on a pony when I was seven. Now I ride three times a day, every day. I rode 15 winners last summer, so I’m hoping to ride 20 this year – that’d be a goer’

At 14, Daniel King, from Kilbrin in County Cork, is nearer still to the age when professional racing might become a reality. “I’m on racehorses since I was 11,” he says, “and I’m doing the point-to-points now as well. I started racing ponies when I was about nine, I suppose.” This wasn’t his first appearance at Ballyferriter – he is already a seasoned familiar of the strand, and the 2018 meeting went markedly well for him. “I think I had seven winners... I know that I won the first five races. But the horses I had were good enough now, to be honest, and I’d have expected to go well.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luke Bourke, 14, after a race near Ballyferriter in West Kerry. The race meeting is held every August

He knows exactly the discipline that’s required should the professional game become a reality (“My weight’s all right at this stage, anyway!”) but the attraction of racing overrides all else. “Ah, it’s a very exciting thing, yeah. Definitely you’d miss it if you’re away from it for any length of time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Bourke, 15: to be a real proposition, a young rider has to be a veteran before secondary school

Racing horses is a kind of glorious infection, and once you’ve got the bug, there is no reliable cure. Alan Powdrill, the photographer who took these portraits, stumbled upon the Ballyferriter scene while on a road trip down Ireland’s Atlantic coast last summer. “I saw a poster for the races in a bar and thought I’d go out and take a look. And I knew straight away it was gold. I hadn’t realised it was going to be all these young kids racing.” The fact of a typically overcast day in West Kerry was ideal. “I knew if I used a flash, I could really make the colours pop.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ava Sugrue, 14: ‘It’s nearly all boys that ride – I’m the leading lady jockey. More girls should try it, they’d find it fun and interesting and challenging, like I do’

The meeting at Ballyferriter is one of many organised by the Horse and Pony Racing Association (Southern Section). There are meetings at Ballingarry in County Limerick, another beach meeting at Ballyheigue in Kerry, another at Allihies way out at the tip of the Beara peninsula in West Cork, and many others. They are held on fields and stretches of sand that have very often been the sites of horse races for hundreds of years. Many of the famous Irish jockeys have come through from the ranks of the HPRA meets – Norman Williamson, Wayne Lordan, Kate O’Brien. If you can keep manners on a jerky two-year-old across the sands of Béal Bán, nothing that Aintree or Cheltenham can throw up should faze you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Caoimhe Sugrue, 11: ‘I love everything about horses. My favourite is called Pal, my Pally. He’s quiet and friendly’

I’ve been around racing people a bit over the last few years, researching a film script. I have found among them no more than a grudging acknowledgment that there is such a thing as life beyond the racing of horses, but how dull and inert it must be, and why would you even bother? This is very much a tribe, and there are particular tribal instincts. Even with jockeys as young as these, there is a lovely kind of reticence, or modesty. There is no big talk. The victories are worn lightly; the defeats are all the more frequent and are suffered without complaint. It is a sport with a tacit magic made of the trust that develops between jockey and horse, the silent agreement that they can only get through this thing together.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Dunleavy, 17: ‘Every jockey’s ambition is to get to the Grand National, but I want to race at Cheltenham or Aintree, too. Nothing beats the adrenaline’

On days like this at Ballyferriter, the peninsula might seem to be en fête – the chip vans are out, and the bouncy castles – but when it gets down to the hard business of racing, the attention is intense and deeply serious, and nothing, but nothing quickens the blood like the roaring thunder of a galloping pack across the compacted sands. This is inarguably the kingly sport, even still, and there isn’t a corner of the earth where it is more important to the texture of life; neither is there a place where the riders are more revered.

• Kevin Barry’s new novel Night Boat To Tangier is out this week. His racing script, The Gee Gees, is in development with Element Pictures.

If you would like a comment on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).