Qualla: The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin

The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Theiner, CC BY-SA 3.0. Step through the door of the Long Room and the smell hits first - centuries of leather binding, old paper, and the faint mineral tang of stone walls that have not been warm since 1732. The eye climbs sixty-five meters of oak bookcases up to the barrel vault arching overhead. Marble heads on stone plinths watch the visitors pass: Swift, Newton, Shakespeare, Boyle, all rendered in cool stone by Peter Scheemakers and Louis-François Roubiliac in the 1740s. And tucked into a glass case at the far end, opened to two illuminated pages, lies the Book of Kells - an eighth-century gospel manuscript whose interlace patterns once kept Irish monks bent over vellum by candlelight.

Image: Patrick Theiner | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin: Burgh's Long Vision

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mith, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Thomas Burgh began the library in 1709, Trinity College had been collecting books since the time of Archbishop James Ussher - the same Ussher who calculated, by reading the Old Testament, that Creation had happened on the night before 23 October 4004 BC. Burgh's building was...

Image: Mith | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin: The Vault That Made the Room

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barcex, CC BY-SA 3.0. Visitors who think the barrel vault has always been there are mistaken. The original ceiling was flat, exactly as the painter James Malton recorded it in his 1792 illustration. By the mid-19th century the library had finally outgrown Burgh's shell. Between 1859 and 1861 the archi...

Image: Barcex | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin: Heads on Plinths

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Claudius Gilbert, vice-provost of Trinity, died in the 1740s and left money for marble busts to line the Long Room. Fourteen original busts arrived in the mid-1740s, eight signed by Peter Scheemakers and the rest believed to be the work of Louis-François Roubiliac - sculptors who...

Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin: The Manuscript at the End of the Room

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cristina Morettini 95, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Book of Kells came to Trinity for safekeeping in the 1660s and never left. Bound in four volumes, two of which are usually on display, it contains the four Gospels in Latin, written and painted somewhere between 800 and 825 in a monastic scriptorium on Iona or at Kells. The i...

Image: Cristina Morettini 95 | CC BY-SA 4.0