`It's a place of absolute peace and quiet, yet you're only 30 miles from the capital city. At night, you can even see the glow in the distance," said Insp John Dunleavy of Edenderry Garda station.

Castlejordan, six miles from Edenderry, isn't even a village. Its post office is out along one road and its national school along another. The centre is marked by the Catholic church, the old school, a shop and a pub. The road to Edenderry can barely accommodate two meeting cars. The only "disturbance of the peace", as a garda jokingly put it, erupts around Leinster football final time, when the Meath-Offaly border, which straddles the townland, highlights different allegiances.

It's a place for lavish displays of county flags and bunting, not for showy Southfork spreads or hedges chainsawed into submission. The farms here are small and mixed, respecting old ways and rhythms. A few animals graze lazily in the fields and the hedgerows are heavy, lush and scented with blossom, reflecting a lifestyle and traditions that are fading into history, like the generation to which Peter and Paddy Logan belonged.

The Logan brothers lived about half a mile from the village, up a 200-yard grassy laneway cut through a field, in an old Land Commission cottage. In local parlance, they were "snug", with a farm of about 30 to 35 acres, tending about 60 sheep, a few cattle, hens, sundry cats and Skippy the sheepdog. They boiled the old black kettle on a big, open turf fire and aired the clothes on a line strung above it. They collected their pensions every week from the local postmistress and went to 10 o'clock Mass every Sunday, always sitting back in the same corner.

Paddy liked to recall the time he travelled to the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin as a young lad of 13, to be an altar server. He was a gifted storyteller, "well able to hold a crowd", specialising in yarns "with a bit of a twist". For a party piece, he could recite every last verse of Dangerous Dan McGrew.

They were good and indulgent neighbours. Their old herdsmen's wisdom made them highly respected as animal diagnosticians and healers. If a neighbour's animal was ailing, the response was: "Don't get the vet, get Paddy." When chocolate treats were being bought for Skippy the dog, any children in the vicinity got their share too. Children stuck with raffle tickets to sell knew that the Logan house was always worth a visit.

For Peter and Paddy Logan were no bowed-down old codgers, weary of living. They loved life, didn't give a toss about any tribunals but were full of curiosity about people at every level, about their parish, about local history. When Paddy turned up at Mass after a recent spell in hospital, his reception was like a "triumphal entry", said Father Paddy Dillon, the parish priest.

For the most part, and with the help of a niece, the two brothers led independent lives. Paddy, the younger by a couple of years, drove them into Edenderry most days to get the paper and the meat. Chops, steaks and rashers had to be "thick and fat" and so had to be specially cut. Gossip was an integral part of these outings and Paddy in particular valued his sources, showing his gratitude with regular tips.

He did most of the cooking too, and when they finally got the phone in four years ago - on the urging of the parish priest - Paddy was the one who used it. When the first marauder came calling in January, it was Paddy who coolly said he had some money in another room and reappeared with a shotgun. A shot fired in the air sent the would-be robber scuttling for safety and made 81-year-old Paddy the talk of the county, its own have-a-go hero.

As brothers, they were inseparable companions, gentle and congenial, more complementary to each other and more harmonious than the average married couple, with their shared liking for Coronation Street and sports commentaries on the radio.

"My best friend is gone," Peter said to a friend at Paddy's removal on Wednesday.

It was a mark of the 83-year-old's inner strength that, despite the severe beating he sustained and the trauma of his brother's death just two days before, he mustered the physical and spiritual resources to leave his hospital bed. With livid bruising around his eyes and plasters covering part of his face and hands, he gazed at his brother's coffin, touching it sometimes with a trembling hand. Inside the church, the 500-strong congregation acknowledged his presence with a burst of warm applause.

"In my 40 years as a priest I've not seen that before", said Father Dillon.

They saw off Paddy Logan in a way he would have appreciated. The family had asked that the funeral be conducted "as though nothing had happened". So they celebrated his long, gentle and generous life, remembering him, in Father Dillon's words, "as a good man, very kind and popular. . . We can honestly and truly say about him that he never did a wrong turn to anyone. . . Paddy Logan was eight beatitudes".

Outside, they carried his coffin to the cemetery through an honour guard of local schoolchildren, their hands joined solemnly, some with tears in their eyes. Among the 20 wreaths was one "From your brother Peter".

The congregation, invited back to Larkin's in Edenderry, met a composed and dignified Peter, who shook their hands and talked about normal things. "He's not going over and over what happened on Monday," said Father Dillon afterwards. "Only once did I see him getting as emotional as I am. There's an enormous inner strength in that man, an enormous belief in people. He's a powerful man, and so was Paddy."

In the kind of gesture that marks out a genuinely close-knit rural community, it was announced that the local sports day, scheduled for Sunday, has been postponed.

But in the practical world that Peter Logan must return to, neighbours and friends are fearful, and not only for him. They fear for themselves, with a vulnerability that first manifested itself in January with the attempted robbery on the Logans. Many of them flinched from the front-page coverage given by one newspaper to that robbery. Anything that might focus on their remoteness, that might draw attention to the number of elderly people living alone there, or might provoke revenge, was considered unwise.

"Dublin criminals haven't bothered us here," said a local garda. "It's generally break-ins and the kind of criminal damage by a few drunks on Friday nights."

The local detection rate, at around 80 per cent, or twice the national average, bears this out. The most recent murder, for which the file has just gone to the DPP, involved people staying temporarily in the area. And the murder before that, though part of sensational national events, is already fading into memory. That was the killing of Donal Dunne by Malcolm McArthur.

But time and circumstances are catching up with places like Castlejordan. The property craze, the tentacles of which have reached into Edenderry like every other town within city commuting distance, will see to that. Already used as an alternative route to the west, this town of about 5,500 souls is set for huge growth, with more than 1,000 planning applications in process. Insp Dunleavy remarks on the phenomenon of "a solid queue of traffic, mostly Dublin-registered cars, from Edenderry to Leixlip every morning", en route to work at Intel and Hewlett Packard.

A mixture of anger and impotence, fear and fond memories jostled for primacy in the minds of Castlejordan people this week. Some wished grimly that they could find the perpetrators of this crime themselves and impose their own justice. Others are shocked by the sudden sense of their own vulnerability. "It's unreal what fear can do," said a local man, describing the plight of a "hardy" female relative. "My son drove into her yard a few days ago and she jumped. She jumped again when he opened the door."

Most powerful, though, is the sense of impotence. The Logans were not reclusive old men. They had good, vigilant family and neighbours, an unusually active Community Alert organisation and constant reminders from the parish priest and gardai about security. They had a telephone, a panic button and a shotgun. They were active. In fact, had Monday been a dry day, they would have been shearing sheep instead of sitting in their kitchen.

But they grew up in the era of the permanently unlocked door, when open-faced young fellows who dropped in to talk about a football match in broad daylight on a summer's day were just what they seemed. And so there would have been no need to reach for an alarm, or a phone or a shotgun.

Still, Father Dillon is confident that, with the help of neighbours and Peter's own inner strength, the elderly man will again be able to feel secure in his home.

"People could be calling in to him three times a day," he said. "It's the kind of place where people would do that. Peter is the kind that could come through this. He'd have a good sense of his life, and thankfulness for his life. There is an enormous contentedness and thankfulness and serenity about some people, and he is one of them."