Dublin

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Dublin Castle 1,500 points

  Go in. The yards inside are open ground and the route runs through them: Upper Castle Yard, the Lower Yard, the steps at the side. Most visitors photograph it from outside and carry on. I would rather have the paving.

• Ha'penny Bridge 500 points

  Cast iron, painted white, and about wide enough for two strangers to disagree politely. Stand in the middle for a moment: the quays run off in both directions, both banks of the river at once. Then move along, because standing about is not eating.

• Hugh Lane Gallery 500 points

  A grey Georgian front on the north side of Parnell Square that gives away nothing at all from the footpath. It costs nothing to walk in. Go up the stairs and look at the ceilings on your way past.

• Saint Mary's Cathedral 500 points

  It sits on Marlborough Street with barely room to step back and take it in. Cross to the far pavement and try anyway. The portico is asking for a much wider approach than the one it ended up with.

• Butt Bridge 250 points

  The plain one, hard up against the railway girders. Everybody grumbles that the ironwork beside it ruins the view east, and everybody uses it anyway. Flat, wide, quick. I have a lot of time for a thing that simply works.

• Campanile 250 points

  The college leaves its gates open, and the ground underfoot changes the moment you are inside: setts, then gravel, then grass. That alone is worth the detour. Walk under the middle of it and keep looking up.

• George's Street Arcade 250 points

  One way in on each side of the block, and the quickest line between them goes indoors. Old books, records, a hat stall, and the smell of coffee about halfway along. I count the floor tiles every single time.

• Gloucester Diamond 250 points

  Four short terraces meeting at an angle, well away from anywhere selling anything. This is the quiet end of the route and the reason it reaches so far east. Stand in the middle of it and turn slowly around. Nobody will mind.

• Wolfe Tone Square 250 points

  A flat rectangle of grass behind the shopping streets, with benches, shade and pigeons who have seen it all. Sit down for ten minutes. Then get up, because the lanes around it are the good part and they do not walk themselves.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Two things made this spot: somewhere to get across, and somewhere to stop. The ford was the most easterly place you could wade the Liffey, so it was the hinge between the country north of the water and the country south of it. A little further down, the river ran deep enough to moor a ship, and that pool sat roughly where Parliament Street runs today. Cross here, land here. Both banks of this walk grew out of those two sentences, and I have been eating the result ever since.

Sources: www.logainm.ie, www.dublincity.ie

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

841-1170

The Norse. They came for somewhere to keep their ships and stayed for the money. Within a hundred years the pool had lent its name to the whole port, and other languages took that name and ran with it: a Welsh writer of the tenth century calls the place Dulyn. The Irish went on naming it after the ford instead. Two names, two opinions, one set of lanes underneath.

Sources: www.logainm.ie

1171-1922

The crown, from a long way off. Henry II wintered here and at Christmas 1171 handed the town to his men of Bristol, with permission to come and live in it. The parchment saying so measures 121 by 165 millimetres, is the oldest document this city owns, and still sits in a strongroom on Pearse Street, which you walk down on this route. Eight hundred years of decisions about this place, and the first one is smaller than a dinner plate.

Sources: www.dublincity.ie, www.dublincity.ie

1922-

Ireland. From September 1922 the parliament has met in this city, and when the present constitution was written the point was put in plain language: the Houses of the Oireachtas shall sit in or near the City of Dublin. After eight centuries of instructions arriving by boat, that one sentence is doing a great deal of quiet work.

Sources: www.oireachtas.ie, www.irishstatutebook.ie

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. Look at the map. Most of it is a medieval tangle, and then a few lines run dead straight through the middle of it. Those are one committee. From 1757 the Commissioners for Making Wide and Convenient Ways could buy a house, take it down and lay a road through the hole. Parliament Street, Westmoreland Street, the widening of Dame Street and the bridge at the bottom of O'Connell Street are all their doing. They stopped work in 1851. Ninety-four years is a long time to spend straightening one dinner.

   Sources: www.dublincity.ie

2. Halfway down Fishamble Street there is an archway in a wall and almost nothing behind it. There used to be a music hall back there, seating seven hundred, and six months after it opened, Handel's Messiah was performed for the first time anywhere on that spot. The hall went to an engineering works in 1868 and then went altogether. The arch is still in the wall, on a lane most visitors use as a short cut.

   Sources: www.buildingsofireland.ie

3. The oldest thing still standing inside the college is a long red brick range that everybody calls the Rubrics, which is what happens to the words 'red bricks' after three hundred years in Dublin mouths. It went up around 1700 and it closes two of the squares you cross on this walk. The curly gables and the tall chimneys look like the oldest part of it and are the youngest: they came in 1894, along with an extra floor.

   Sources: www.buildingsofireland.ie

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 189streets
• 2,094dots
• 32.8km of street
• 43.2km on foot
• 12.3hours at a stroll