Tomás’s work for the British surveying commission culminates in a violent accident that physically literalizes the destructive nature of his colonial collaboration. After being derisively called “Paddy” by an English sapper, Tomás is forced into a ditch where his right hand, “the one that can conjure a landscape in inks and pictograms and lines and calculations” (234), is brutally injured. The amputation that follows is more than a personal tragedy; it’s a symbolic dismemberment enacted by the very institution he serves. By losing the hand that he uses to create maps, Tomás is stripped of his primary means of both earning a living and pursuing his subversive project of cultural preservation. This incident emphasizes the brutal power dynamics of the Ordnance Survey, revealing it as an arm of an oppressive regime that considers its Irish collaborators expendable. The event dramatizes Cartography as Colonial Erasure on a deeply personal level, as the agent of that erasure is himself silenced by his employers, rendering him unable to complete his own counter-map.

Following the loss of his hand, Tomás fundamentally redefines his relationship with the Irish landscape and the symbol of maps. He laments that he can never finish his personal mapping project, which feels like “the forfeiture of another limb” (261). In its place, he resolves to physically walk the country, to “damn well trace it with his feet” (262), in search of his valley of origin. This transition from mapmaker to wanderer is a shift from abstract representation to direct, embodied experience. His new quest is to locate himself within his native land, to connect with a personal history that pre-dates colonial records. This pilgrimage reinforces the theme of Landscape as a Witness to Historical Trauma, suggesting that the land itself holds a deeper, more personal truth than any official map can convey.

In his solitary wanderings, Tomás’s reflections lead to a painful re-evaluation of his family and legacy. He’s struck by the sudden realization that Enda “would have made the perfect apprentice” (265). This belated insight exposes the gendered assumptions that shaped his decisions and prevented him from realizing Enda’s innate curiosity and resilience, qualities that mirrored his own. For years, he fixated on molding his son into a successor, overlooking the daughter who possessed the true spirit for his counter-cartographic mission. This recognition recasts Enda’s flight as the logical next step for the child who most fully inherited Tomás’s independent and inquisitive nature. The tragedy for Tomás is twofold: He both lost his chosen heir to the Church and also failed to recognize his true successor before she, too, was gone.

The narrative uses a split perspective to contrast the divergent paths of Liam and Enda, who both seek escape from the family’s poverty and grief. A key sequence juxtaposes Liam cautiously descending a ladder in the novitiate’s library with Enda, disguised as her brother, confidently boarding a ship bound for Québec. Liam’s choice shows a flight into a rigid, punishing institution where his spirit is immediately tested by hunger and ritual humiliation. In contrast, Enda’s departure is an act of daring self-invention. By appropriating Liam’s identity and passage, she subverts patriarchal expectations and seizes a future for herself, demonstrating Cultural Resilience as Anti-Imperialist Resistance through individual ingenuity and courage. While Liam surrenders his autonomy to the Church, Enda forges a new identity, carrying with her the fiddle, a potent symbol of the culture she refuses to abandon. Their simultaneous but opposing journeys highlight the limited options available and the different forms that resistance can take.

The motif of music and the fiddle is a powerful conduit for memory, identity, and community. As Liam leaves for the novitiate, Enda plays “the same tune she played that time in the copse” (226), a melody that, for him, marks the moment his fate was sealed. The music acts as a non-verbal expression of their shared history and her complex feelings about his departure. Aboard the emigrant ship, Enda’s fiddle playing transforms the grim reality of the crossing, uniting the displaced passengers in a shared cultural experience. Her music offers solace and fosters a sense of community among people who have lost everything but their heritage. The fiddle becomes an emblem of cultural resilience, a portable piece of Ireland that cannot be mapped or colonized, providing a source of strength and connection in the face of deep dislocation and the historical trauma of the Great Famine.