St. Patrick's Cathedral

Step off Patrick Street, through the heavy door, and listen to the sound change. Traffic fades behind you. The air turns cool and smells of stone and candle wax. Your footsteps echo across patterned tiles, under a roof that rises far overhead. This is Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the largest church in Ireland, and people have gathered to pray on this ground for a very long time.

The story begins with a well. Tradition says that Saint Patrick baptized converts here in the fifth century, using water from a spring beside the church. That is legend rather than record, and it is honest to say so. But the legend is old and stubborn, and it gave this place its name. Inside the cathedral you can see an ancient stone slab, found nearby, that is said to have covered the well itself.

The first church here was small and built of wood. In 1191 the site received a new status, and stone construction followed. Most of the building around you dates from the thirteenth century, in the early English Gothic style: pointed arches, tall narrow windows, and a long nave that pulls your eye toward the altar.

Dublin holds a strange distinction. It has two medieval cathedrals standing a short walk apart. Christ Church stood inside the old city walls, while Saint Patrick's stood outside them, among ordinary streets. The two churches spent long years as rivals, and in 1300 they needed a formal agreement to divide their roles in the city's religious life.

Outside, the tower at the northwest corner is called Minot's Tower, after the archbishop who rebuilt it in the fourteenth century. The granite spire above it was added in 1749. Together they reach about 43 meters over the street, and the tower carries a ring of bells that still sounds across the neighbourhood.

The cathedral's most famous resident is a writer. Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, served as dean here from 1713 to 1745. He preached from this pulpit, defended Dublin's poor in print, and grew fiercer with age. He lies under the floor near the entrance, beside Esther Johnson, the woman he called Stella. He wrote his own Latin epitaph. It says he has gone where fierce indignation can tear his heart no more.

In the north transept, find the old wooden door with a rough hole cut through its centre. In 1492, two feuding noble families, the Fitzgeralds and the Butlers, faced each other here. One side took refuge in the chapter house. To end the standoff, Gerald Fitzgerald cut a hole in the door and stretched his arm through, offering his hand to his enemy. The handshake held, and Ireland gained a phrase: to chance your arm. So the story goes, and the door is real either way.

Music runs deep in this building. A choir school has worked here since 1432. In 1742, choristers from Saint Patrick's joined the first performance of Handel's Messiah, given a short walk away on Fishamble Street. The choir still sings on most days in term time, and hearing those voices rise into the stone is worth planning your visit around.

By the nineteenth century the cathedral was close to ruin, damp and structurally unsafe. Rescue came from beer. Benjamin Lee Guinness, head of the brewing family, paid for a full restoration between 1860 and 1865. Much of the interior you see, from the floor tiles to the roof, dates from that campaign. His statue stands outside the south door, and his family's name appears quietly all over Dublin.

Walk the aisles slowly. The Boyle monument rises in painted tiers, crowded with figures of the family of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork; one small figure is his son Robert, who grew up to help found modern chemistry. Overhead in the choir hang the banners of the Knights of Saint Patrick. Old regimental flags fade high on the walls. They are left to crumble on purpose, as an act of remembrance.

When you step outside, walk into the green space beside the cathedral. Saint Patrick's Park was laid out in the 1890s, after the crowded lanes around the church were cleared. A wall at its edge honours Dublin's writers, from Swift and Wilde to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. The legendary well is placed by tradition somewhere in this ground.

This is still a working cathedral of the Church of Ireland, with prayers said every day, as they have been in one form or another for centuries. Before you leave, stand once more in the centre of the nave. Eight centuries of voices have risen into this roof: monks, deans, choirboys, soldiers, tourists. The stone holds all of them, and it asks nothing from you except a moment of quiet.