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 realize 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 coordi-nates. What every story really needs is a journey.
Dad had always boasted about being “all the way Irish,” but he could never prove it; the fam-ily history, such as it was, had faded entirely after a
