An Englishman now living in Ireland is constantly amused by our "bypass culture" - as in the accepted practice whereby politicians open new sections of road or motorway amid a blaze of publicity.
He finds it so bizarre and incomprehensible that he laughs aloud just to think of it. Yet put those same ministers in Army uniforms with a few stripes on, and one can begin to understand the intent.
It's a little known fact that the State's first road project was for military purposes. The road stretched from Waterford to Cork and was completed in 1789. After the 1798 rebellion was quelled, and Charles Cornwallis was appointed Lord Lieutenant, he decided to commission a similar project, at the request of landowners, to put manners on some troublesome types in the uplands of Wicklow.
Rathfarnham was the starting point for the man hired to do the job, a Scottish surveyor by the name of Alexander Taylor. Drawing on experience of moorland work, Taylor took just a month to devise a proposed route, along with an estimate of the cost.
Planning issues did not pose a problem: the landowners affected had signed the petition demanding the road and, as Michael Fewer writes in a new history of the project, there was that essential element of "martial freedom".
About 200 spades, 200 shovels, 30 pickaxes, 40 wheelbarrows and 20 crowbars were requisitioned for the early work. Cornwallis approved the use of 200 infantry soldiers, who were to be paid an extra shilling on their normal day's pay.
Fortunately, some sections of road were already in place when Taylor began the project in August, 1800 - the longest being a six-and-a-half mile stretch between Rathfarnham and the "hamlet" of Rockbrook.
Fewer notes that there is a folk memory in Ballyboden, south of Rathfarnham, of some of the soldiers being "boarded out" there. However, most of the staff were based in encampments, the headquarters being near Aurora in Glencree. Some two centuries later, there is no trace of such temporary structures on Lord Powerscourt's lands, though a field near the Aurora settlement is called "the Camp" and is surrounded by a stone wall, while another is named "the Hospital".
Fewer, author of many walking guidebooks, lives near the Military Road; reading a book about Alexander Taylor inspired him to do more research. He is not a professional historian, he points out, but his literary journey travels "through time as well as space". It relates the background to construction, and the historical significance of buildings and archaeological and geological features on the route - some still visible, some disappeared.
He starts with the Yellow House, a late 19th-century landmark in Rathfarnham which was mentioned by James Joyce after he and his father paused there in 1912 and was frequented by Liam O'Flaherty. The road continues in its early stages past a former "sick poor dispensary" at Glenbrook, demolished in the 1970s, to Bloomfield, a bow-fronted, three-bay house identified by some historians as having been occupied by Robert Emmet's older brother, Thomas Addison Emmet, during the later 18th century.
The route continues to Riversdale, leased by William Butler Yeats in May, 1932 as his last home, and by artist Sean Keating's bungalow, Teach Tuadh Mumhan, to a former 18th-century mill at Bolton Hall. From St Enda's School, founded by Pádraig Pearse, it runs by Stocking Lane, Mount Venus and one of the best preserved 18th-century hunting lodges in Ireland - the Hellfire Club, source of many tales of "lurid excesses", from burnings to beatings and worse.
From Killakee to Glencree, Taylor and his soldiers would have beheld "a beautiful and extended plain, studded with villas, noble mansions and cottages" and extending to Dublin bay, resembling a "lovely lake", according to a walker, the appropriately named John Trotter, in 1814. Taylor had his first experience of high moorland territory when he encountered the Featherbeds, a blanket bog stretching 4km southwards towards Glencree, where Neolithic dwellers left cairns and passage tombs - such as that atop Seefin.
The road reaches its highest point, 480 metres, by a monument where the body of Noel Lemass, a republican executed "unofficially" by Free State forces, was found in 1923. The Civil War had ended, and it was not until October of that year that someone told his mother where her son's body lay. His younger brother, Seán, was to become taoiseach from 1959. Another monument, further on at the pass between Cullentragh and Kirikee mountains and within view of the mighty Lugnaquilla, commemorates the cyclist Shay Elliott. Elliott used to tie a bag of cement to his bike when training, and was the first Irishman to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. Personal difficulties and the loss of his son in an accident led to his suicide in 1971.
Taylor's work in Ireland was far from finished when the military road reached its final destination at Aghavannagh; he carried out surveys of all the main post roads; and in 1807 he was appointed chief paving commissioner for Dublin city. However, in 1817 a commission found discrepancies in monies he had approved for the post road survey work. A separate inquiry found that Taylor had a habit of drawing off substantial sums for his own personal use.
He didn't deny it, and was removed from office in 1826. The "true Scot" had not been a popular man in Dublin, in spite of his achievements, well into his late seventies.
• The Wicklow Military Road: History and Topographyby Michael Feweris published by Ashfield Press with the Heritage Council.