The Day we Went to Galway

 To complete our stay in the hallowed grounds of Trinity College, we braved breakfast in the Buttery for the final time. I behaved, confining myself to cereal and milk - no fruit and no yoghurt!  I didn’t want to buck the system on my last day. 

We packed up and checked out, depositing  our bags with the nice man in the luggage room before assembling in the Front Square for our Trails of Trinity tour. 

Our animated guide, a very recent Trinity graduate, described the twin buildings with the matching columns which face each other across the square, as Heaven (the chapel) and Hell (the examination hall). We were told of the student superstitions surrounding the central bell tower, and taken into the very impressive Museum building. Here we could explore the foyer with its samples of Irish granite, which we had seen featured on the outside of the building, and prehistoric elk skeletons!  

After a quick look at the College Green and the Samuel Beckett theatre building, our guide delivered us to the library for the Book of Kells experience. 

When I visited Dublin briefly 14 years ago, seeing the famous Long Room of the Library and the Book of Kells was one and the same, as the 9th-century illuminated manuscript was housed in the Long Room. 

There were no queues or explanatory displays to pass through, you simply viewed the book as you walked past into the library. Today however, there is a whole industry surrounding the book of Kells. 

You first pass through a detailed display describing the history of the manuscript, its theft and subsequent retrieval, the dyes and pigments used to create the array of colours for the illustrations and lettering, and the painstaking work involved in the preservation and restorative work of rebinding the book into four separate volumes back in the 1950s. 

Then you move into a dim room where the book is housed in a glass case. The page display is changed every 6-8 weeks and we were lucky enough to see a fully illustrated page and its corresponding page of text. 

From here you walk upstairs and into the Long Room - a breathtaking cathedral of books. 

The smell is of centuries of history contained in leather-bound books reaching all the way to the domed ceiling. Unfortunately, at the moment, there are not many books on the shelves, as the Old Library Redevelopment Project is underway. This huge undertaking, scheduled to last until 2030, involves upgrading, cleaning, protecting and conserving the 200,000 volumes normally housed in the Long Room. Currently only 20,000 books remain in the first four bays. 

We were still able to wander the length of the Long Room and appreciate the space, the four new statues of eminent women (the first female statues to be exhibited there in the library’s history), and the new Gaia sculpture hanging at the far end. 

 

 

The next stage of the Book of Kells experience takes you into a huge red container-like-building (which looks totally out of place in the college grounds), for an immersive experience of stories sights and sounds, before depositing you in the gift shop. 

A very informative and interesting morning steeped in ancient history crossed with 21st century innovation and tech. 

We walked out of the grounds to find some lunch in yet another Italian restaurant before returning to collect our luggage. We were perplexed to find the keeper of the luggage was on his lunch break, so we had half an hour to wait. 

Luggage finally retrieved, we walked the crowded streets to catch a LUAS light rail to Heuston Station for our onward journey. As the afternoon progressed and we crossed the heart of Ireland from the east coast to the west, a train trip of 2.5 hours, we saw more farmland, more sheep, more cattle, and a few horses. I have decided Ireland is one big farm. Everywhere was green. Arriving into drizzly Galway however, we felt as though we had crossed into another country. The architecture of the houses is different here and the weather is certainly cooler; fingers crossed it improves for tomorrow.