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Her first release attracted little attention, but one of the few who did take notice was Rob Dickens, then chairman of Warner Music, who signed her to the label, despite little obvious sales potential. "I do remember people saying to me, ‘Your music’s not very commercial. How are you going to sell that?’" Enya admits today. Dickens was equally unsure if he could sell her and famously observed at the time: "Sometimes the company is there to make money, and sometimes it’s there to make music. Enya’s the latter."

Confounding all predictions, Watermark, her 1988 debut for Warner’s, sold nine million copies to make her Ireland’s best-selling solo artist, and spawned the chart-topping single Orinoco Flow. "I didn’t expect such a huge reaction, but I knew I was doing something different to everything else that was happening at the time," she recalls. "People feel a very personal connection with the music."

Her music was swiftly dubbed New Age, but she dismisses the label as "a marketing term". She’s happier that her music has spawned an adjective of its own – "Enya-esque". "That’s a huge compliment because it means you’ve something in which you were the first."

Her fans have remained devoted to her work ever since her initial success, and subsequent albums such as Shepherd Moons, The Memory of Trees and A Day Without Rain have all done similar or better business. Then in 2001, two of her songs were used in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, resulting in an Oscar nomination.

Her new album, Amarantine, was finished the night before we meet, and she confesses the reason it has taken so long is because she’s utterly obsessive once she gets in the studio. "There might be one little thing that makes all the difference, one note or one word. The fine-tuning is all important, and you’ve got to stay there until you get it right," she insists. "That’s why it can take years."

Her workaholic existence finds her writing at the piano from ten till six, and holidays are not on the agenda. "We’re not people who know how to take holidays," she observes. "We literally wouldn’t know how to go about booking one." She does, however, take care to separate work and home. Her castle, which she insists is a "small" one, has a music room, but it’s purely for "social use".

Enya fell in love with Manderley Castle, built in the 1840s, the minute she saw it and bought it nine years ago for £2.5 million. "It was in terrible condition, but I’ve made it very homely," she says.

When it comes to children, she notes that she has plenty of nieces and nephews, and she’s also a surrogate aunt to the Ryans’ two daughters, Ebony and Persia, now grown up. The couple are a decade and more older than Enya, and over the years have been variously accused of manipulating her and keeping her from the real world. It’s clear that she relies on them heavily, but having seen her steely resolve over her stalkers, it’s hard to imagine her being anyone’s puppet. "It’s a huge thing to have someone like that who believes in you from day one," is all she will say on the relationship, and when they come up in our conversation she refers to them not as her management team but as "my friends".

In the past, Enya has sung in Gaelic and Latin as well as English, and on the new album, she sings three songs in an entirely invented language called Loxian. The idea came to Enya and her lyricist after she had sung in Elvish for The Lord of the Rings. "We’ve always concentrated on the sound of the words so that they enhance the melody. Sometimes a song just doesn’t sound right in a particular language," she explains. Yet Loxian is not just an imaginary language, for Roma has constructed an elaborate Tolkienesque history of its people to accompany the songs. The sound of the Loxians, she writes in the album sleeve, "awakens in the hearts of all the Valley-dwellers a longing that brings them to the edge of tears, because it is the song of both the beginning and the end".

Out with the leprechauns? Perhaps. Except that while indulging such flights of fantasy, the Ryans are also very sharp business operators who have guided Enya’s career with enviable skill, and built her into an internationally recognisable brand. The Irish papers recently estimated the singer’s wealth at £100 million when reporting the break-in to her castle, and the deal her team have negotiated with Warners gives the three of them unprecedented control over every aspect of the making and selling of her music.

When we meet again at Château Vaux Le Vicomte a couple of weeks later, Warner executives are swarming everywhere and are clearly eager to please their star turn. Just before she arrives, a record company employee ushers everyone into the entrance hall to form a greeting party. When she makes her entrance, she’s wearing a dramatic backless red gown, and she works the room expertly.

Before we sit down to a banquet there’s a spectacular firework display that ends with Enya’s name picked out in flames. She smiles politely and poses for pictures, but you can’t help thinking that she looks like the only person in such spectacular surroundings who wishes she were somewhere else. At the end of the evening, she’s the first to leave. Then again, most of us don’t have a castle to go home to.

Amarantine is released on Warner Music

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