Trinity College Dublin

The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin is one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, a sense that arrives before you fully understand why. At 65 metres long and housing some 200,000 of the oldest volumes in the college's collection, the room unfolds in the grand 18th-century style that defines Trinity at its most impressive: oak-panelled, barrel-vaulted, and flanked by marble busts of writers and philosophers whose carved eyes seem to follow you between the shelving ranges. The shelves themselves, arranged in two tiers and reaching to the ceiling, are loaded with books in deep leather and faded cloth, some chained in the old style as they once were. The effect is of a space that has been accumulating meaning for three centuries without interruption, and the smell of old paper that rises when the library is quiet reinforces it.

The Book of Kells, Trinity's greatest treasure, is displayed in a climate-controlled gallery at the corridor's end, its pages turned to a different opening each day. The manuscript was produced in a Columban monastery in either Iona or Kells around the year 800 CE, and its 680 pages are covered in dense Celtic knotwork, evangelist portraits and script so fine that scholars debate whether it was intended to be read at all or purely to be marvelled at. The pigments are as vivid as the day they were mixed, which is itself remarkable given that the vellum pages survived Viking raids, Reformation suppression and centuries of Irish damp. Photography is prohibited in the book gallery but permitted in the main room, and the contrast between the hushed reverence of the Kells display and the living university around it is part of what makes Trinity feel less like a museum than a working institution that has been continuously teaching for more than four centuries.

The campus beyond the Old Library rewards wandering beyond the obvious highlights. The 18th-century Main Building encloses a cobbled quadrangle that is the social heart of the college, and the Campanile tower at its centre was designed by the architect of Oxford's Radcliffe Camera. The Museum Building, a Victorian Gothic exercise in polychrome brick and stone, houses collections in natural history and the fine arts that are open to visitors. Founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I on the site of the former Priory of All Hallows, Trinity was for centuries a Protestant-only institution that barred Catholics, a policy that ended only in 1972 under pressure from the Irish government and the courts. That history of exclusion makes the college's current role as a genuinely diverse and internationally minded university feel all the more hard-won.

The Old Library's Long Room is one of the most photographed interiors in Ireland and rewards time spent in its quiet.

The Book of Kells is among the finest surviving manuscripts of the early medieval world.

The campus sits in the centre of Dublin and combines centuries of architecture within a few minutes' walk of Grafton Street.