A day of culture in one of Europe’s most cultural cities.

First up the Book of Kells at the Old Library, Trinity College. The Book of Kells is probably Ireland’s greatest cultural treasure and is the most famous medieval manuscript in the world. It is a lavishly decorated manuscript, written in Latin, of the four Gospels of the New Testament together with some other tables and texts. It was probably created in about 800AD by monks on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. After attacks by Vikings on Iona the Book of Kells was moved to a monastery at Kells, county Meath, Ireland. It was sent to Dublin about 1653 to keep it safe during the Cromwellian period. In 1661 it was presented to Trinity College. There are other manuscripts of the same period at Trinity, The Book of Durrow and The Book of Armagh but these are not as lavish as The Book of Kells. The manuscript today contains 340 folios and is bound in four volumes. Two volumes are normally displayed at Trinity, one opened at a major decorated page and one at a text page with minor illustrations.

The Book of Kells is displayed on the ground floor of the Old Library, Trinity College. There is quite a large interpretive area where the history is explained and there are large brightly covered examples of pages from the manuscript along with explanation of the meaning in the illustrations. These are back lit and about 3 metres high by 1.5 metres wide and look rather like stained glass windows. There is an audio visual showing the making of a book from calf skin (vellum) and the pigments and techniques used in the text and illustrations. This is all very good. From there you move into a partly darkened room and in the middle is a glass topped steel cabinet. In the cabinet are the displayed manuscripts. Compared to the large copies seen previously the originals look small, dull and faded, probably due to the low level of artificial light. There is a scrum of people pressing around the cabinet and it is difficult to get a decent look. So it is a little bit of a let down. There is no photography allowed in any part of the Book of Kells display.

From there you go directly up to the next floor to view the Long Room of the Old Library of Trinity College. This is a wonderful space. 65 metres long, two stories high with a barrel vault ceiling. It has alcoves on two levels containing about 200,000 of Trinity College’s 6,000,000 books. Books are arranged by name of author in alphabetical order. At each alcove there is a marble bust of a writer, philosopher, statesman or religious leader. In the middle of the room is a harp, the oldest to survive in Ireland. Legend attributes it to Brain Boru, high king of Ireland (died 1014), but in fact it was made in the fifteenth century. The Long Room is still a working library with a reading room at each end and tall angled ladders to reach the highest volumes. I thought this room was an absolute joy. From there we walked around the grounds of Trinity College and that was the morning done.

In Harry Street, near Trinity College, we found the statue of one of Dublin’s favourite musical sons, Phil Lynett, of Thin Lizy. Remember ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ and ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.

We wanted to get away from the crowds and noise of Dublin so in the afternoon we did a bus tour to Malahide Castle and Gardens. Parts of the castle date back to 1175 and it is one of the oldest Norman castles in Ireland. It was the home of the Talbot family for nearly 800 years (1185 to 1975) with only a brief interlude between 1649 and 1660 when the castle and land were seized by Cromwell’s forces. The castle and grounds were eventually inherited by the seventh Baron Talbot and when he died in 1973 it passed to his sister Rose. In 1975 Rose sold the castle and grounds to the Irish State to offset crippling Inheritance Taxes. The bus tour had us at the castle for a guided tour of the castle that took 45 minutes of the allotted one hour. The tour was very good but we would rather have spent much more time in the 260 acres of gardens. The castle is full of an eclectic collection of furniture and paintings with most of it relating to many generations of the Talbot family.

We then had a sort of Groundhog Day experience. The tour took us to Howth for a 40 minute stop. This is the same village we stopped at yesterday for morning tea on the Newgrange Tour. Today was a beautiful sunny day so the village seemed a bit more attractive than yesterday. We spent the time sitting on the wharf, eating gelato and watching seals in the bay.

Not looking forward to tomorrow when we start our trek home at 10.30pm.