Its professed intention was ‘to direct the attention of persons looking out either for investments or for new settlements, to the vast capabilities of the Sister Island’, and it goes into great detail on the manuring of land, the Incumbered Estates Act, and other practicalities; I suspect it was also intended to boost the author’s own courage and that of his family in facing emigration to the Ireland of that still famine-stricken date, for it is remarkably positive in outlook, and one has to read the small print of quoted matter in the appendices to find a mention of potato blight. I did glean a few grains of information on Connemara, but it was an incident from his travels in Mayo that has lodged in my mind. In Ballycroy, a remote glen of Erris, the author calls upon another Englishman, Mr S, who tells him about the strange meeting which led to his own settling there. This episode, quite out of keeping with the rest of the book, is entitled ‘The Echo Hunter’. I have trimmed it a little.
