Today we had tickets for a walking tour of Trinity College, a visit to the Book of Kells, and the Old Library. Trinity College is about a 20 minute walk from our hotel. After a nice breakfast at the hotel, we set off. I will say, though, free breakfast at Hampton Inns in the U.S. don’t compare to the one here at our hotel. We can help ourselves to a full English breakfast, great breads and pastries, 8 different kinds of coffee, meats and cheeses, and lots of fruit. We’ve treated ourselves to “take out” of breads and deli stuff for lunches and/or dinners. It’s been great.
We walked along the River Liffey to start. It was a nice morning, about 62 degrees, and partly cloudy. We saw swans swimming in the river. I really enjoy a city with a river running through it. I wish Binghamton would do something with its rivers to entice more people to downtown, other than students that is.
We crossed the river to the Temple Bar district, which is Dublin’s vibrant cultural and nightlife quarter. It reminded me a lot of the French Quarter in New Orleans. What we love walking around many areas in Dublin is the abundance of flowers that adorn so many of the buildings.And there certainly was an abundance in Temple Bar.
This area is home to the famous Temple Bar Pub, established in 1840. The pub advertises itself as the established home of traditional Irish music in Dublin; the pub with the largest collection of whiskies in Ireland and the pub with the largest selection of pub sandwiches anywhere in the world. The locals call it an overpriced tourist trap and steer clear of it. But, it is a very nice looking establishment.
We arrived at the main entrance to Trinity College and saw the Campanile through the doorway.
This was where our tour of the college began. Trinity students give a 45-minute tour of parts of the campus. From the photo above to the Campanile is called Parliament Court. Around this courtyard, it looks very symmetrical with the Chapel Building on one side and the Exam Hall on the other. Students call these two buildings Heaven and Hell.
Trinity College was founded in 1592 by charter of Queen Elizabeth I. It was built on the site of an abbey that had been present since the 12th century. Henry VIII had the abbey demolished after he was denied a divorce by the Pope. Trinity College was created as a Protestant university and until 1870 it was rare for Catholics to attend. Many in Ireland still think it is only a Protestant university. Our guide told us that for many Irish students, tuition is nearly free, with the Republic paying the bulk of the tuition. For foreign students, tuition is about 30,000 euros. About 22,000 students attend the college, 58% are women.
Our guide told us about the Campanile and that students do not walk under it. As the story goes, if a student is under the Campanile as it chimes, he/she will fail exams. Because the bells are only chimed for special events, students never know when the bells will sound, so better not to walk through the Campanile ever.
Another story was about a provost of the university, George Salmon who served from 1888 until his death in 1904. He is infamous for saying that “over my dead body will there ever be a woman admitted to Trinity.” Well, on the day of his funeral in 1904, the first woman was admitted, Isabel Marion Weir Johnston.
One of the buildings around the Library Courtyard that is beyond the Campanile is the Graduates Memorial Building. It looks very old, but it is one of the newer buildings, built in 1902. It houses many of the oldest university clubs, like the Debating Club and the Philosophical, Theological and Historical Clubs.
One of the oldest building on campus is the Rubrics, a smash up of the words red brick. The building was designed and built around 1700. I stole the photo below from Wikipedia.
One of the prettiest buildings is the Museum Building. It was built in the mid-1800s and is built entirely of hand-carved stone. Folklore has it that there is stone from every quarry in Ireland somewhere on the exterior. Only two men chiseled all the stonework. There are over 600 individual flower motifs surrounding the entire building, all hand carved, no two flowers the same.
We went inside the museum briefly. The staircase and the domed ceiling were great. There were several arches having red and white stripes that reminded me so much of what we saw in Cordoba, Spain at the Mosque-Cathedral. I asked our guide about them and she said they were of Spanish influence, so I showed her a photo of the Mosque-Cathedral, and she was impressed.
Our guide then left us at the Book of Kells exhibition. The Book of Kells is a richly illustrated medieval manuscript containing the four Gospels, widely considered Ireland’s finest national treasure. Crafted around 800 AD by Celtic monks, it is celebrated for its masterful calligraphy and intricate, vibrant illumination. It was written in Latin on vellum (calfskin) and has incredibly intricate illustrations. Seeing the actual book itself was kind of a non-event because it was in a glass case in a darkened room. Photographs of the book were forbidden, so you got to have about 10 seconds looking into the case as queued up people behind you wanted you to move on. There was a very good exhibition beforehand, with an audio guide, that explained a lot about the book. However, it was noisy and crowded and difficult to really understand the exhibits. So, the Book of Kells was somewhat anticlimactic for me.
What knocked my socks off, though, was the Long Room in the Old Library. The library was built in the late 1700s. Its collection was over 700,000 books, and as the library gained every book published in Ireland and the United Kingdom, it ran out of space and the roof was raised and a new barrel vaulted ceiling and roof was created. The oldest books are a collection of over 200,000 books dating back centuries. Even though only about 17,000 books are currently shelved in the Long Room, walking into it is stunning. In addition to the 65 meters (213 feet) of two levels of shelves, and the marble busts lining both sides of the room, there is a giant orb, called Gaia, hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the room. It is a depiction of one of the photos an astronaut took of the Earth from space. It was absolutely amazing.
Most of the books have been removed for a huge renovation and conservation project. There were little movies in some of the shelving alcoves about the conservation process. Very amazing to see that each book is removed by hand, carefully cleaned, measured, tagged, entered into a database, wrapped and placed in boxes and moved to storage – each book! The whole process is known as decanting. It was fascinating to learn about the process.
Even without the books, the room was absolutely amazing.
There is also a medieval harp on display known as the Brian Boru harp. The harp is the oldest of its kind in Ireland; it has incorrectly become associated with the great Irish king Brian Boru (died 1014). Although its early history is uncertain, it probably dates from the 15th century. It is made of oak and willow with 29 brass strings, and is the model for the emblem of Ireland.
We sat on a bench for a long time just taking in the awesomeness of this magnificent room. It was really something to see.
After the Long Room, our tour ended with an immersive experience where we watched 2 films, one of which was broadcast on a surround screen. It was about the history of the Book of Kells. The other was about the history of the Long Room. Both were good and we enjoyed them. All in all, the Trinity Trails experience was well worth doing. Learning about the college was interesting. I suppose it was important to learn something about the Book of Kells. But, for me, the main attraction was the Long Room. It was fantastic!
After all that, we wandered around for a while. I wanted to get to two places that Eve, Christine’s daughter, told us about, but directions were very difficult to follow. We’d been on our feet for several hours and we were both dragging so more walking was not very appealing. We stopped at a convenient store for a cold drink and a snack and sat on a wall in the Temple Bar area. After that, we decided we’d had enough touring and so we headed back to the hotel for a rest. I suspect we’ll be down for the count and won’t venture out later in the afternoon. Tomorrow, we head to our cruise ship.