In the early years of the nineteenth century the mountain range which runs along the east coast from outside Dublin through Wicklow into county Wexford was a country difficult of access and unsubdued.  Here in 1803 Emmet found a refuge, and after Emmet’s death here Michael Dwyer still held out:  Connemara itself was hardly wilder or less accessible, till the “military road” was run, little more than a hundred years ago, from Dublin over the western slopes of Featherbed, past Glencree, and through Callary Bog, skirting Glendalough and traversing the wild recesses of Glenmalure, so that it cuts across the headwaters of those beautiful streams which meet in the Vale of Ovoca.  From Glenmalure the road climbs a steep ridge and then travels in wide downward curves across the seaward side of Lugnaquilla—­fifth in height among Irish mountains.  Here, at the head of a long valley which runs down to the Meeting of the Waters, was built one of the barracks which billeted the original garrison of the road.  Later, these buildings had been used for constabulary; but with peaceful times this grew needless, for there was little disturbance among these Wicklow folk, tenants of little farms, each with a sheep-run on the vast hills.  Nothing could be less like the flat sea-bordering lands of the Barony of Forth in which the Redmonds spent their boyhood than these wild, sweeping, torrent-seamed folds of hill and valley; but the place came to him as part of his inheritance from “the Chief.”  Parnell’s home at Avondale was some ten miles from here, lying in woods beside the Ovoca River; but the Parnell property stretched up to the slopes of Lugnaquilla, and the dismantled barrack was used by him as a shooting lodge.  Here, in the early days before his life became absorbed in the masterful attachment which led finally to his overthrow, he spent good hours; and here the two Redmonds and those others of his followers who were his companions came to camp roughly in this strange, gaunt survival of military rule.  After Parnell’s death Redmond bought the barrack and a small plot of land about it, and it became increasingly and exclusively his home in Ireland.  It was, indeed, Ireland itself for him.  In it and through it he knew Ireland intimately, felt Ireland intensely and intensively, not only as a place, but as a way of being.  Ireland to him meant Aughavanagh.

Partly, no doubt, the almost unbroken wildness of his surroundings appealed to an element of romance in his character, which was strongly emotional though extremely reticent.  Only an artist would have recognized beauty in those scenes, for in all Ireland it would be difficult to find a landscape with less amenity; the hill shapes are featureless, without boldness or intricacy of line.  Redmond, a born artist in words, possessing strongly the sense of form, was sensitive to beauty in all kinds—­yet rather to the beauty that is symmetrical, graceful and well-planned.  A sailor does not love the sea for its beauty, and Redmond loved Ireland as a sailor loves the sea—­yet with a difference.  Ireland to him in a great measure was Aughavanagh, and Aughavanagh was a place of rest.  Ireland is a good country to rest in.  But it would have been far better for Redmond and for Ireland if Ireland had been the place not of his rest, but of his work.