Marcus Ó Ceallaigh grew up in the west of Ireland within earshot of Galway Bay, in a townland where the ruins of old tower houses were simply part of the landscape children played among without ever asking who had built them. That question stayed with him. Years spent poring over parish records, faded genealogies, and the footnotes of academic histories eventually became a devotion to the older, stranger story of Gaelic Ireland - its lordships, its poets, its long and often heartbreaking negotiation with conquest. He is especially drawn to the moments history usually skips past: the quiet legal maneuvers, the private family reckonings, the literature written in defeat rather than victory. When not reading seventeenth-century military correspondence for pleasure, he can be found walking Connacht's boglands, still looking for castles nobody else remembers the names of.