The west side of College Green is dominated by the grand Palladian façade of the Bank of Ireland across the road. Enter the building through the grand portico in front, giving a nod as you pass to the statue that stands there. The statue is of Henry Grattan (1746–1820), the leader of the Irish Parliament that in 1782 passed the Declaration of Rights empowering Roman Catholics to become practising lawyers, and also calling for independence for Ireland. His timing was unfortunate. Britain had just lost its American colonies, and was in no mood to concede anything to Ireland. When it was completed in 1739, the dignified building was the world’s first purpose-built parliament house, but served its original purpose for less than a century. The Irish Parliament became a platform for spokesmen like Grattan, but in 1800 the British government forced the Act of Union, making the Dublin parliament redundant. The Bank of Ireland bought the building soon afterwards, and added more prosaic sections, converting the former House of Commons into its cash office. Join one of the guided tours of the former House of Lords, with its splendid wood-panelled interior. The huge tapestries that celebrate the great victories of the Protestant Ascendancy in 1690 at the Siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne seem oddly out of place in 21st-century Dublin.

Leave the bank, about face, and cross College Green to the main entrance of Trinity College. The college’s dignified grey stone façade, the West Front, occupies the block facing you. A semicircular lawn, College Green, lies in front of the main entrance and provides the setting for statues of two of Trinity’s most famous alumni. To the left, as you face the entrance, stands Edmund Burke (1729–97), the conservative philosopher and outspoken opponent of the French Revolution. On your right is Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74), the 18th-century satirist and playwright.

Pass through the grand wood-panelled main entrance into a cobbled quadrangle, which has well-manicured lawns to either side. This is still known as Parliament Square, and ahead of you stands one of Trinity’s most prominent landmarks. The Campanile, a 100ft (30m) tall bell tower, stands on the site of the much older Augustinian monastery of All Hallows, which was dissolved by Elizabeth I’s father, Henry VIII, during the turbulent years of the Reformation. This stolid, solid building was designed by Sir Charles Lanyon (who also designed Queen’s University, Belfast) and was built in 1853. The bell tower stands atop an arched base; walk through the arch, and on your left is one of Trinity’s more modern landmarks, a massive abstract sculpture. Reclining Connected Forms (1969) is unmistakably the work of Henry Moore, whose sculptures grace the great parks of so many world cities.

You are now on Library Square, and facing you (occupying the entire east side of the square) is an imposing four-storey, redbrick façade. Although Trinity was founded in 1592, this building, known as the Rubrics and dating from about 1700, is the oldest extant part of the college complex.

With the Campanile behind you, walk between the lawns of Library Square. Just in front of the Rubrics, turn right, and at the corner of the square turn right again. On your left now you will see the rear of the Old Library. Continue to the end of the building, turn left and left again and walk halfway down the front of the Old Library (the south side of Fellows’ Square) to its entrance, on your left. The Old Library, which took 20 years to build (from 1712 to 1732) is the most impressively gracious element of Trinity College’s architectural treasury, and its splendid, echoing Long Room, with its towering oak shelves holding more than 200,000 volumes, is an amazing storehouse of knowledge. Like the British Library in London, the Old Library has the right to a copy of each and every book published in the UK and the Republic of Ireland (including this one), so its collection continues to grow. The Long Room is aptly named, and is in fact 200ft (64m) in length. Marble busts of Ireland’s most famous scholars and literary men stand in serried ranks beneath the bookcases.

At the east end of the Old Library building, the Treasury uses the latest in museum science to preserve some of the world’s most valuable ancient manuscripts in pristine condition. Christianity came to ‘Holy Ireland’ from Rome during the Dark Ages. An Irish princeling turned missionary, St Columba, brought Christianity from Ireland to Scotland, from where it reached the Angles of Northumbria and eventually the rest of Britain. Columba set up his first monastery on the Scottish island of Iona, which remained the spiritual home of Christianity in Scotland until repeated Viking raids forced the monks to abandon the island in the early 9th century AD, bringing their religious treasures with them. The Book of Kells, the gloriously, intricately illuminated manuscript which is the library’s most precious treasure, is one of these. Brought by monks from Iona to the monastery of Kells, near Newgrange, it is the highest expression of a uniquely Celtic form of religious art. The Treasury also houses a portfolio of other superb illuminated manuscripts that are almost equally impressive and worth a look. 

Exit the Old Library, turn left and walk to the corner of the Old Library building at the northeast corner of Fellows’ Square. Turn right briefly to bypass a small sunken garden, then left around the corner of the Berkeley Library Building. On your left, up some steps, is the sward of New Square, the largest of Trinity’s quadrangle lawns, and straight ahead of here you will see the Museum Building. This structure is a little at odds with the other buildings of the Trinity College Campus, but nevertheless an architectural triumph. The Venetian façade of this Victorian building was designed by Benjamin Woodward and Sir Thomas Dean in 1857. Inside, the polychrome main hall and double-domed roof are more impressive than the slightly fusty collection of antiquarian exhibits, but the two towering skeletons of the giant red deer that once roamed Ireland’s forests are worth a look.

Turn about and walk back across the space between the Museum Building and the much more modern Berkeley Library, designed in 1967 by Paul Koralek. Equidistant between the library and the museum is a huge, gleaming steel spheroid sculpture. This is Sphere within a Sphere (1982) by Arnaldo Pomodoro, which was a gift from the sculptor to Trinity. The Berkeley Library is named after another Trinity alumnus, the theologian Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), who was famously vexed by the question of whether an event – such as a tree falling in the forest – could truly be said to have occurred if there was no one to observe it. He eventually concluded that since God is omnipresent and all-seeing, everything exists because he continually observes it.

Turn left and walk along the east side of Fellows’ Square, with the Berkeley Library on your left, then turn right to walk along the edge of Fellows’ Square to the entrance of Arts and Science building on your left and the Douglas Hyde Gallery to your right. Walk through the Arts and Science building lobby to reach the Nassau Street exit.