Writing history is easier than you might think.

You only need two key ingredients, people and records of what they were doing,

and then you can pretty much write a history of anything.

Now the challenge is to make it interesting,

but I have rarely, if ever, experienced the place that doesn't have a

history. It might not always be the most gripping, but everywhere has a past, or so I thought.

However, last October I found myself cycling down the Wicklow Military Road, and after leaving

the town of Grand Cree, a place oozing with history, I entered what

felt like a historical desert of sorts, a vast expanse of Moorland that feels endless. The only

history out there seemed to be the Wicklow Military Road itself, and halfway across that wilderness,

even that history seemed to run dry.

However, I would discover that this was something of an illusion, and that there is a history

out there in that wilderness, just not the one I was expecting to find, because a place defined

by its lack of people, let alone written records, was inevitably going to be different

than anything I was used to.

Hello and welcome to the Irish History podcast. My name is Finn DeWar. And this is the second

episode that it explores the evocative past of the Wicklow Military Road,

a route carved into one of the most remote corners of Ireland by the British Army in the early 19th century.

Now in the first episode, I follow the road and its intriguing history from Georgian Dublin,

a city reeling in the aftermath of the largest insurrection in modern Irish history, and somehow I ended

up in a war cemetery buried deep in the mountains. This episode, as I've said, is a very different

part of the story. It takes you through a moorland. It was a journey through what some have called

...