Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403150159
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALAN LITTELL|
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It is a leisurely place where the gift of Irish Wit is appreciated best over unhurried pints of Guinness stout - the smooth, dark, native brew - in pubs like Mulligan's on Poolbeg Street or the Bailey on Duke Street.
Rich in literary associations, Dublin resonates to the measured cadences of Swift, Yeats and the immortal Joyce, and its winding streets and leafy squares display undimmed a centuries-old affinity with elegance and grace.
If your stay can only be a short one, however, a three-hour walking tour of the city center will impart much of the poetic appeal of this ancient metropolis.
And for an outing that takes in the main shopping district as well as literary haunts and historical sites, a good place to start is the top, or south, end of Grafton Street, a lively pedestrian mall of department stores and specialty boutiques.
Down the street on the left, as you walk toward the River Liffey, sample a morning or afternoon coffee and pastry in Bewley's Cafe. The popular rendezvous, a Dublin landmark, evokes the mahogany-paneled coffeehouses of one and two centuries ago.
Diagonally opposite you'll find Brown Thomas, a Victorian emporium known for its wide selection of Irish linens.
At Nassau Street, Grafton Street widens into College Green. The broad curving thoroughfare is flanked on one side by the splendid stone facade of Trinity College, Ireland's oldest university. On the other is the Bank of Ireland, a neo-classical pile that stands as one of the earliest of the great public buildings erected in Dublin in the 18th century.
Ambling past Trinity - you'll return to it later - brings you to O'Connell Bridge, main crossing of the Liffey. Parapets on either side afford uninterrupted views of a low, irregular skyline scaled comfortably to human proportions.
You are now a three-minute walk from the columned and pedimented General Post Office on O'Connell Street, the most hallowed of Irish revolutionary shrines.
Here on Easter Monday 1916 a band of patriots led by Patrick Pears first hoisted the national tricolor and proclaimed Ireland's independence from Britain.
Turning back the way you came, stroll along O'Connell Street and veer left on Abbey Street. At the junction with Marlborough Street you come to the world-renowned Abbey Theater, where plays by Sean O'Casey and William Butler Yeats heralded the Irish literary revival of the early l900s.
Retracing your steps to O'Connell Bridge and walking down Westmoreland Street to College Green brings you once again to the main entrance of Trinity College.
Turn through the arch of the front gate, and you pass from the bustle of downtown Dublin to the tranquility of a cloistered, cobbled quadrangle.
Visitors will find Ireland's greatest treasure, the 8th-century Book of Kells, in the barrel-vaulted Long Room of Trinity's Old Library, on the southeast corner of the quad. The sumptuously decorated Latin text is surely the most famous and arguably the most beautiful illuminated Gospel manuscript in the world.
The Long Room is lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound volumes and the busts of noted graduates of the college, among them Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. And on one wall hangs a rare surviving copy of the 1916 declaration of Irish independence.
Visitors cannot help but be moved by the document's rallying cry: ``We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and the unfettered control of Irish destinies.''
The Long Room is open 9:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. Saturday. Admission is $3.
Stroll across the quad and leave by the side gate into Nassau Street. Turning left, you come to some of the finest - and most expensive - shops in the Grafton-Nassau commercial enclave: the House of Ireland for Aran cable-knit sweaters and Waterford crystal, Kevin and Howlin for Donegal tweeds, and the Kilkenny Shop for traditional handcrafts and tableware.
Nassau Street funnels past Kildare Street into Merrion Square, the heart of Georgian Dublin. Once the city's most fashionable address - it was planned in 1762 for Viceroy Lord Fitzwilliam - the stately complex is laid out on a grand scheme of four-story row houses surrounding an oasis of shrubs and trees.
Merrion Square is celebrated throughout Ireland for its distinctive ``Dublin Doors'': multicolored portals gleaming with brass, framed by fluted columns and surmounted by wide fan-shaped windows.
As you wander around the perimeter, note also the historical markers recalling that Oscar Wilde lived at No. 1, Yeats at No. 82, and George William Russell - the poet and painter known as ``AE'' - at No. 84.
If you have the time, detour across Merrion Square West to the National Gallery of Ireland; on view are important holdings of Irish and Continental European art. The gallery is open 10 to 6 Monday through Saturday, 2 to 5 Sunday. Admission is free.
(For a visit to the National Museum, around the block on Kildare Street, with its dazzling collection of Celtic antiquities, you will need at least another morning or afternoon).
From the National Gallery walk south past Leinster Lawn and Ireland's Houses of Parliament to Merrion Row. There, turn right to St. Stephen' Green, the city's central park of lawns and gardens.
Just across the boulevard of St. Stephen's Green North you pass the Georgian town house where Oliver St. John Gogarty lived from 1915 to 1917. Gogarty is best remembered as the poet and surgeon who figured as a ``stately, plump Buck Mulligan'' in James Joyce's monumental novel of turn-of-the-century Dublin, ``Ulysses.''
Continue west past the Shelbourne Hotel and bear right on Dawson Street. A few steps beyond the imposing Mansion house, the 280-year-old residence of Dublin's lord mayors, turn left on Anne Street South.
At the next corner cut through Duke Lane to Duke Street. This is where readers of Joyce will want to pay homage to a curious relic of ``Ulysses.'' At No. 2 a short flight of stairs leads to the heavy wooden door taken from No. 7 Eccles St., home of the book's fictional hero, Leopold Bloom.
By now you will have come full circle. Your starting point, Grafton Street, is only paces away. So turn back down the stairs from Bloom's uprooted door and into the adjoining Bailey, a famous old Duke Street pub frequented by artists and writers.
There is no more fitting way to end a walking tour of Dublin than in the ``comfort of the public house'' - the phrase is Joyce's - raising a glass of stout in salute to the poets and talkers around you and to the vitality and easy charm of a comely, atmospheric city.
Alan and Caroline Littell are a free-lance travel writer and photographe team based in Alfred, N.Y.|
by CNB