Trinity College Dublin

Pass under the arch of the front gate and listen as the city fades. Thick walls swallow the traffic on College Green. Cobblestones spread out in front of you, ringed by grey stone and old brick. Students cross the square with coffee cups and bicycles, the way students have crossed it for more than 400 years. This is Trinity College Dublin. Take a breath here before the crowds pull you forward.

Queen Elizabeth the First founded the college in 1592, on the site of a closed monastery that stood outside the medieval city walls. It is the oldest university in Ireland. For centuries it kept itself apart from the city around it, while Dublin grew, burned, and rebuilt. The walls held the quiet in and, for a long time, kept most Dubliners out.

The great square ahead of you is Parliament Square. Two matching buildings face each other across it: the Chapel on your left and the Examination Hall on your right, both finished in the late eighteenth century, their pale columned fronts mirroring one another. Between them stands the Campanile, the bell tower, raised in 1853 on roughly the spot where the old monastery once stood.

Students tell a story about the Campanile. Walk beneath it while the bell tolls, they say, and you will fail your exams. Many refuse to pass under it until graduation day, when they walk through in their gowns at last. Stand here a few minutes and you may catch someone bending their path around it, just in case.

The Old Library stands beyond the square, built between 1712 and 1732. It holds the college's greatest treasure, and one of Ireland's: the Book of Kells. Monks made this copy of the four gospels around the year 800, working with quills and mineral inks on vellum, which is calf skin. The book later survived Viking raids and centuries of unrest, and it came to Trinity in the seventeenth century for safekeeping. Today it draws close to a million visitors in a busy year.

The pages are dense with ornament. Capital letters twist into birds and snakes. Spirals coil inside spirals, drawn so fine that people once claimed only angels could have made them. The exhibition beneath the library tells the story, and the book itself lies in a guarded case, opened to selected pages that change from time to time.

Upstairs runs the Long Room, 65 meters of oak shelving under a curved timber ceiling. It has held around 200,000 of the library's oldest books, with marble busts of writers and thinkers lining the central walk. The barrel ceiling is not original: it was added in the nineteenth century, when the library ran out of shelf space and built upward.

In recent years the Long Room has been the centre of a major conservation project. Staff have lifted books from the shelves to clean them, tag them, and protect them for the future, so parts of the room may look bare when you visit. It remains a remarkable sight either way. Check the library's website for the current arrangement before you go.

Among the treasures shown with the library's collection is the Brian Boru harp, one of the oldest Gaelic harps to survive, made in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. This small instrument became the model for the national emblem of Ireland, and, turned the other way around, for the Guinness trademark. Few objects carry more national identity per kilogram.

Trinity's roll of writers is long. Jonathan Swift studied here, and so did Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Samuel Beckett. Statues of two more graduates, the philosopher Edmund Burke and the writer Oliver Goldsmith, stand guard outside the front gate, facing the traffic. Women were first admitted as students in 1904.

Walk deeper into the campus and it opens unexpectedly. College Park spreads out in green, with cricket played on summer afternoons in the middle of the city. Beside the Old Library stands its opposite: a concrete library from the 1960s, heavy and bold. In front of it turns a polished bronze sphere by the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, its cracked-open surface reflecting the square.

Before you leave, find a quiet edge of the square and stand still. Four centuries of students have worn these cobbles smooth: future rebels, poets, scientists, and a great many people who simply passed through and lived ordinary lives. The college keeps taking in the young and shelving the old, one student and one book at a time. The bell will ring again soon.