Where To Go in Dublin
22 places across 9 categories — the landmarks on the postcards, the observation decks, the museums, the parks, and the neighborhoods where the city actually lives.
Landmarks
TODO — what landmarks in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Trinity College and the Book of Kells
A walled university in the middle of the city, founded in 1592, with a ninth-century illuminated gospel book and a library that looks the way libraries are supposed to look.
Dublin Castle
Seven hundred years of English rule administered from one courtyard, and almost none of it looks like a castle. The Viking foundations underneath are the best part.
Ha'penny Bridge
A cast-iron footbridge from 1816 that charged a halfpenny to cross for a century. Free now, and the most photographed object in the city.
Museums
TODO — what museums in Dublin are actually worth the time.
National Museum of Ireland — Archaeology
Free, and it holds the best prehistoric gold collection in western Europe plus four Iron Age bog bodies. The single most underrated building in Dublin.
National Gallery of Ireland
Free, with a Caravaggio that spent decades hanging unrecognised in a Jesuit dining room a mile away, and the best Jack B. Yeats collection anywhere.
EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum
Ten million people left this island. This is the museum about where they went and what they did, in the vaults of a nineteenth-century dock warehouse.
History
TODO — what history in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Kilmainham Gaol
The prison where the leaders of the 1916 Rising were executed, and where a great deal of modern Ireland was decided. Guided tour only, and it books out weeks ahead.
St Patrick's Cathedral
The largest church in Ireland, built where Patrick is said to have baptised converts, with Jonathan Swift buried in the floor and his epitaph on the wall.
Christ Church Cathedral
Founded by a Viking king around 1030, with the largest crypt in Ireland or Britain underneath it — and, in a glass case down there, a mummified cat and rat.
Glasnevin Cemetery
A million and a half people buried in 124 acres, including most of the names in modern Irish history, and a guided tour that is one of the best things in the city.
Parks & Outdoors
TODO — what parks & outdoors in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Phoenix Park
Seven hundred hectares, twice the size of Central Park, with a herd of fallow deer that has been there since the 1660s and the President's house in the middle.
St Stephen's Green
Nine hectares of Victorian park at the top of Grafton Street, paid for by a Guinness, and briefly a battlefield in 1916 when both sides stopped shooting so the groundsman could feed the ducks.
Food & Drink
TODO — what food & drink in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Guinness Storehouse
Ireland's most visited paid attraction, in a seven-storey atrium shaped like a pint glass, ending in a glass bar with a view over the whole city.
Teeling Whiskey Distillery
The first new distillery in Dublin in 125 years, opened in 2015 in the Liberties, where there were once dozens. Small groups, real stills, and a fraction of the Guinness price.
Culture & Music
TODO — what culture & music in Dublin are actually worth the time.
The Cobblestone
A pub in Smithfield where traditional music is played properly, in a corner, by musicians who came to play rather than to perform. Free, nightly, and not for talking over.
The Abbey Theatre
Ireland's national theatre, founded by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, and the building where audiences rioted over Synge and O'Casey.
Shopping
TODO — what shopping in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Day Trips
TODO — what day trips in Dublin are actually worth the time.
Howth
A fishing village on a rocky headland at the end of the DART line, with a cliff path, seals in the harbour and the best fish in Dublin. Thirty minutes from the city.
Glendalough
A sixth-century monastic city in a glacial valley with two lakes, an intact round tower and a set of walks that are the best day out from Dublin.
Neighbourhoods
TODO — what each part of Dublin is like to walk around, and who lives there.
Temple Bar
Cobbled lanes, a serious cultural quarter, and the most expensive pints in Ireland. Worth an hour in daylight and worth understanding before you spend an evening in it.
The Liberties
The oldest surviving neighbourhood in Dublin, outside the medieval walls and outside the city's jurisdiction, now full of distilleries again after a century without them.
Stoneybatter
Two-up two-down cottages built for cattle drovers, now the most self-consciously fashionable neighbourhood in the city and still, mostly, itself.