Ireland, at the end of the 19th century, a time of political unrest: Agnes MacDonnell owns a large estate on the remote island of Achill. A tough, determined English woman, she meets her match in the mysterious James Lynchehaun, "fine, dark, animal looking", who persuades her against her better instincts to employ him as her land agent. Despite their class and age difference - she is in her early fourties, he is in his twenties - Agnes finds herself powerfully drawn to the determined Lynchehaun and they have a passionate, if dangerous affair. But almost immediately Agnes becomes scared as the man's evil streak starts to show itself, and - in a climactic scene of deranged violence and emotion - finally destroys her. Brian Lynch's powerful and beautifully paced screenplay draws us into a world of almost Victorian melodrama and the desperate, at times comic struggle for power and domination between an emancipated woman and a persuasive, but destructive man.