His work lay very greatly in London, Parliament occupied every year a longer and longer space.

The task of platform advocacy all over England was urgent, and in England Redmond stood out alone.

It was little to be wondered at that when each long deferred recess came he made it a vacation and not a change of work.

The seclusion from direct intercourse with the mass of his followers which conditions imposed upon him was further accentuated by his personal tastes and his choice of a dwelling.
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.