Dublin Day 3: In and around Monkstown

On the morning of day 3 I was violently sick, so s. and t. walked by themselves past Monkstown Castle ...

... to Dún Laoghaire Pier, where they saw sea lions:

By the afternoon I was well enough to tag along with our host family up Killiney Hill:

 North toward Dublin Bay:

The view south:

Dublin Day 2: Two Old Libraries (and the Book of Kells)

Six weeks after we left for Dublin, I am finally getting around to a hasty report on the rest of our trip. Here is a link to day 1. On Friday, day 2, we did what we came for ...

... with at least one attentive person in the audience:

After rich conversation over lunch in the TCD Dining Hall--and, for one of our company, a humongous slice of rich chocolate cake--we made our way to the Book of Kells exhibit and Trinity College Dublin's Old Library. Pictures are not permitted in the Book of Kells exhibit, so you will have to take my word for it when I say the open pages on display from the Book of Kells were beautiful, and seeing them in person was neat. (You can view high quality digital images from the Book of Kells here.) Because the actual Book of Kells and other medieval Latin Bibles are housed in a highly-secure vault, most of the exhibit consisted of enormous reproductions. Very nice, but we didn't linger.

Even more awe-inspiring, for us libraryphiles, was the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin's Old Library, which is routinely included in lists of the world's most beautiful libraries. Since I didn't bring my camera, I will point you to professional photographs online here, but these pictures, taken with our cell phone camera prove that we were actually there:

A Latin Bible in the Old Library with an illustration from the book of Tobit:

The Trinity College Library was founded with the university in 1592, but the building itself was constructed between 1712-1732, which makes it only the second-oldest library building in Dublin.  

So we hiked across town by way of Christ Church cathedral ...

and St. Patrick's Cathedral ...

to Marsh's Library, which opened its doors in 1707:

One of the attractions of the library is that it looks very much like it did in the early 18th century. Here's how the library website puts it:

"Designed by Sir William Robinson (d.1712) the Surveyor General of Ireland, it is one of the very few 18th century buildings left in Dublin that is still being used for its original purpose. Many of the collections in the Library are still kept on the shelves allocated to them by Marsh and by Elias Bouhéreau, the first librarian, when the Library was opened. ... The interior of the library with its beautiful dark oak bookcases has remained largely unchanged since it was built three hundred years ago. It is a magnificent example of a late Renaissance and early Enlightenment library."

We were told that Narcissus Marsh, the former provost of Trinity College Dublin, founded the library because he disliked having to supervise students at Trinity College who wanted to access its library holdings. Marsh's library was Europe's second "public" library, and Ireland's first. "Public", of course, meant gentlemen and scholars. Even then it was not a lending library. Because of problems with theft, readers were locked into gated cubicles, and had to ring a bell to be let out:

Now, happily, the library is open to women and children too.

Dublin Day 1: The Chester Beatty Library

We arrived at Trinity College Dublin a couple hours later than expected, feeling as blurry and out-of-focus as this picture:

After some much-needed refreshment in the Trinity College Dublin Dining Hall ...

... we made a beeline for the Chester Beatty Library, one of the two "must-see" items on my Ireland bucket list:

The Chester Beatty Library, according to the Lonely Planet Guide, is "not just the best museum in Dublin, but one of the best in Europe." Arthur Chester Beatty was an American millionaire who assembled the 20th century's finest private collection of ancient books and manuscripts, including some of the most important and earliest papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament and Greek Old Testament:

We were exhausted from our trip--getting up at 4 in the morning to ride our bikes across town to catch a bus at the LAST minute to the airport to catch a plane that was delayed on the runway for more than an hour, and then to catch a bus to the city center to meet up with our host, will do that to you--and a little short on time, so the visit was more cursory than I might have liked. But the main thing was to experience a few of the manuscripts, not to photograph them. (At least, that's what I said in an attempt to justify leaving my good camera behind in Cambridge.) High quality professional images of the manuscripts can indeed be studied online at the CSNTM, but there is nothing quite like seeing and reading the actual artifact. You also get a better sense of proportion--they are a lot smaller than I expected:

The museum restaurant and the building grounds are also very nice.

When we were done, we made our way back to TCD and from there, by train, to our lodgings for the weekend...

...which were not in the "Sick & Indigent Roomkeepers Society."