Old Library, Trinity College Dublin

The Old Library of Trinity College Dublin was built between 1712 and 1732 to designs by Thomas Burgh, surveyor-general of Ireland, and it still sits among the university's squares in the middle of the city. From outside it is a long, sober block, its lower storey in calp limestone quarried at Palmerstown and the upper floors in grey granite from Ballyknockan. Inside, on the first floor, is the Long Room: some 65 metres of oak bookcases, gallery and marble, one of the handful of library interiors in the world that people travel specifically to stand in.

The room did not always look like this. Burgh gave it a flat plaster ceiling and a single level of shelving arranged in forty oak alcoves. Because the college had the right to claim copies of books published in Britain and Ireland, the shelves filled relentlessly, and in the 1860s the roof was lifted and the great barrel vault was built, with a second tier of galleries above the first. That later ceiling is what gives the Long Room its famous sense of perspective, the curve of the vault and the rows of spines drawing the eye all the way down to the far end. It is home to about 200,000 of the library's oldest books.

Down both sides runs a procession of marble busts of philosophers, writers and scholars, begun in the 1740s with a commission to the sculptor Peter Scheemakers; the Jonathan Swift is by Louis François Roubiliac. It is described as the oldest continuous series of sculpted portraits in Ireland, and in recent years it has finally admitted women, with busts of Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Augusta Gregory. Among the objects shown in the room are the so-called Brian Boru harp, a late-medieval instrument of oak and willow that served as the model for the harp on Ireland's coat of arms, and one of the original printed copies of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Downstairs, in the Treasury, the ninth-century Book of Kells is displayed open, its pages turned in rotation.

Getting there

Trinity College lies in the centre of Dublin, about 1.3 km from the city's central point, and the campus is free to walk through. The Trinity stop on the Luas green line is on College Street at the side of the campus, and Pearse DART station is right next to the campus. Dublin Airport (DUB) is about 9.5 km away.