You Can Go Home Again

In Ireland, Josh Condon and his father walk back through their family’s history. It takes them to the most unexpected places.

- 

I’M HAVING THIS dream. I’m in a field, gazing up at the ruins of an old castle. My father is there. We head for the tower through the wind and tall grass, but all of a sudden we’re surrounded by the castle guards. They’re on all fours, staring at us, mute and beefily immovable—the guards are cows. I turn to my father, to ask what he makes of it all, but he just snaps a few pictures on his phone and says: “I thought it would be bigger.” A car honks on the road behind us and I realise I’m not asleep, I’m standing with Dad in a dairy pasture in County Cork, Ireland, in the shadow of Condon Castle, the ancestral home going back over 500 years—not that you’d want to spend the night. There’s no heat or roof, and the cold, stony toilet is nothing more than a gravity- fed chute.

Heritage tourism is the new old thing. Various DNA databases have been around since the mid-2000s and make it easy to learn precisely where in the world you’re from, while a proliferation of ancestry sites provide a crowdsourced way to climb, branch by branch, back up your family tree. But those are just chromosomes and coordinates. What every story really needs is a journey.