This chapter explores travel and writing relationship within the context of Anthony Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, which was published in 1847. It argues that travel became a complicating factor in the relationship Trollope had with his audience, for the more he travelled within Ireland the more he came to lose sight of who his audience was and what they expected from him. Tours, adventures and journeys of self-discovery were common narrative forms among early novelists' like Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift, and it was the novel that developed the art and convention of creating detailed presentations of the environment. Novels are not commonly seen as travel narratives; however, for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the distinction between the novel and the travel narrative was far from stable or certain. By Victorian standards Trollope was a prolific traveller whose geographical encounters stretched from Australasia, through Africa and the West Indies to North America.