Dublin

Dublin is a capital at human scale, where cathedrals and Georgian pubs sit a few streets apart. The Book of Kells Experience presents a gospel book illuminated around the year 800, next to the sixty-five-metre Long Room of the old college library and its ranks of ancient volumes. The city gave the world Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, and the whole of Ulysses can still be walked street by street, fixed to 16 June 1904. Dublin Castle and Christ Church Cathedral hold the old core, while St Patrick's Cathedral keeps the grave of Jonathan Swift, who was its dean. At St James's Gate, the Guinness Storehouse fills a former fermentation plant on land held on a nine-thousand-year lease. Phoenix Park unrolls one of the largest walled city parks in Europe, with fallow deer wandering loose. And the DART hugs the bay all the way to the cliffs of Howth and Bray.