I am extremely grateful to Dr Lizzie Boyle and to my colleagues in Sean- agus Nua-Ghaeilge for the invitation to give the Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture (2022), not least because it allowed me to pay my respects to someone whose scholarly company I kept at different stages during my D. Phil. – and someone on whose scholarship I still draw. Yellowed sheaves of hand-written notes bring me back to the Bodleian Library when it not only permitted notetaking in ink but actively fed the habit by providing bottles of blue and black – and blue-black – Quink in a blotter-littered hatch by the issue desk. Those notes catch me in the act of scouring Walsh’s Gleanings from Irish Manuscripts, Irish Men of Learning, Irish Chiefs and Leaders, and his editions of Ó Cianáin’s Imeacht na n-Iarlaí and Ó Cléirigh’s Beatha Aodha Ruaidh. They bring back the physicality – and frustrations – of bibliographical searches in a time before online catalogues: hoiking an enormous, alphabetically ordered catalogue (Va-Wap) onto a shelf and trawling through pasted-in, ‘movable-slip’ entries, to track down the scattered essays which Nollaig Ó Muraíle subsequently brought together in Learning through the Ages.