In 1865, 10-year-old Liam assists his father, Tomás, a mapmaker, in performing a British army survey on a remote Irish peninsula. Tomás, a native Gaelic speaker, translates local place names into English for the “redcoats” (a colloquial term for the British military). While he does this work, Tomás is privately determined to ensure that his revised maps serve as a record of the devastation caused by the Great Famine, a history the British officers want the project to ignore. 

Discovering an unmapped copse (grove) of trees, Tomás sends Liam inside to find a stream’s source. Liam becomes terrified in the woods, mistaking moss-covered mounds for the graves of starved children. After hearing a sound like human laughter, he flees in a panic, losing one of his boots. Tomás enters the copse to retrieve it and continue the survey but fails to return. After waiting for hours, Liam limps back to their lodgings in a longhouse owned by a widow. She comforts him, giving him dry clothes from a cedar chest she hasn’t opened in years, containing garments that have never been worn. She recalls having previously told Tomás how the famine had reduced the area’s population from over 40 households to just four.