Trinity College Dublin, Front Square

Back when I was a lad, I studied at Trinity College Dublin. Here are a couple of photos and a video of it. Trinity is one of the most-visited tourist attractions in Dublin.

Here is the Front Gate of Trinity. It is locked at night, but when I lived in college I could come and go as I pleased. It was nice to have a place right in the center of Dublin.

When I see the front of Trinity, I always think of the James Joyce line: "The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city's ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward" (from "A Portrail of the Artist"). Joyce went to UCD, Trinity's rival.




Front Gate is always capitalized, and never called "the Front Gate" except by tourists or townies.

Walk through Front Gate, turn around, and you can see the Front Gate from inside Front Square. When I was a student there, the upper floors were taken over in a student protest by socialist students, but they were persuaded to end the occupation when it was pointed out that if they were arrested then the US Government would not give them J1 visas for summer work in the US.



Looking into Front Square from Front Gate, after rain:



The Chapel is on the left, and the Dining Hall / Commons on the right.



The Campanile and the Graduate Memorial Building (seen of many lively debates by Trinity's two debating societies, the Hist and the Phil):



The College Chapel:


It is, of course, free to stroll around Trinity's Front Square. If you want to visit the Book of Kells, an old copy of an illustrated bible housed in Trinity's Old Library, then you pay for that.