This is both a travel book and a search for nineteenth-century origins. Christopher Koch had two Irish great-grandmothers who arrived in Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s: one a Protestant gentlewoman, the other a Catholic servant girl transported as a convict. In July 2000 he travelled to Ireland with his friend Brian Mooney, the Irish folksinger and painter, to find traces of these ancestors - and also to discover how much remained of traditional Ireland as the nation enjoyed its economic boom, putting the past behind it....