This book is of a time when Bridget Rose Tansey, a linen worker in County Armagh, waited in vain for her freedom-fighter husband to return. He never did. Now a young widow, she took her two sons away from The North, fearful for their safety, to Dublin and its Workhouse and from there to County Wexford, where her boys inadvertently became involved in the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798.This book is of a time of love lost and love found, of a young English journalist in love with two Irishwomen, one dead, one alive. A time when a blacksmith invented a weapon which caused terror and mayhem in the ranks of the British army; The Wexford Pike, and the Croppy Boy who wielded it in battle. A time when another new state was named for The United States Of America — Kentucky. A time when a young Dublin solicitor confounded Napoleon Bonaparte with his eloquence and downright insolence. A time when a simple country curate amassed an army of forty thousand peasants, that for a glorious few weeks shook the Empire to its foundations and barbaric means were instituted to bring the Croppy army to heel and Ireland dragged screaming to the altar of Unionism and a further one hundred and twenty years of inscrutable hostilities.
