Written in conjunction with a television series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Famine, this book paints a realistic picture of the background of the day: the feudal structure of the country with its many estates owned by Anglo-Irish landlords whose tenants and small holders struggled to survive; Catholic and Anglican priests quarreling over details of dogma while the poor starved around them; the press's report of the suffering, in the face of which the governor and people of England showed a massive lack of concern.

The book does not purport to be a comprehensive history or analysis of the Famine, but rather serves as an excellent primer. It is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings and cartoons of the day, both in color and b/w.

The National Library of Ireland and other depositories are the source of this collection of documents that includes contemporary newspaper reports, workhouse records, maps, statistic and engraving. A running story-line guides the reader through the context of the documents as the tragedy unfolds, revealing attitudes and prejudices of Prime Ministers, administrators and landlords; the first hand experiences of those involved in relief efforts, and the trauma and tribulations of the victims. The Department of Manuscripts holds the records of many of the great landed estates, which provide an excellent primary source for understanding the roles of the landlords in Ireland's great catastrophe.

In the aftermath of the Great Famine, the owner of the Martin Estate in Connemara died and his 2,000 acre estate went up for sale. The mortgagors evicted many of the tenants, and in 1853 sent a young Scotsman to report on the potentiality of the estate. This is his fascinating journal of his day by day exploration of "...this inhabited desolation, Connemara after the Famine."

Recently discovered at an auction in England, this remarkable account gives Colville Scott's cock-sure, metropolitan observations on squalid hostelries, rent-evading tenants and thieving beggars. His description of a meeting with the Guardians of Clifden Workhouse is as brutally comic as Thackeray, but in other dealings he show a straightforward warm-heartedness that makes the journal as moving as it is richly informative. He records many extraordinary encounters with individual survivors of the years of starvation, come traumatized into idiocy, other mysteriously bettering themselves on well-nigh invisible means.

Tim Robinson, author of Stones of Aran Vol I: Pilgrimage, and several other works about Connemara, supplies an introductory background of Connemara history and situates Colville Scott's responses in the ideology of imperialism. Footnotes, maps, sketches from contemporary guidebooks as well as sketches by Colville Scott himself illustrate this journal, a newly discovered primary source of information about a bleak turning point of Irish history.