Library of Trinity College Dublin

The barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Long Room is younger than the room. When the Old Library went up between 1712 and 1732, to a design by Thomas Burgh, its main chamber had a flat ceiling, books on the lower level only and an open gallery. In 1801 the library gained legal deposit rights for the United Kingdom, which entitled it to a free copy of every book published in Britain and Ireland. By the 1850s the shelves were full, and in 1860 the roof was raised to fit an upper gallery of bookcases.

The result is a hall 65 metres long holding 200,000 of the library’s oldest books. The library itself dates from the founding of Trinity College in 1592 and is now the largest in Ireland. It is the only Irish library with deposit rights for British publications, which it shares with a few libraries in Britain, among them the Bodleian.

Marble busts line the aisle. The collection began with fourteen by Peter Scheemakers, and its best-known piece is Roubiliac’s Jonathan Swift. In 2020 the college added four women, Rosalind Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Augusta Gregory and Mary Wollstonecraft, the first new sculptures commissioned for the room in over a century.

Most visitors come to the Old Library for the Book of Kells, the 8th-century manuscript given to the college in 1661. The Long Room also shows the Brian Boru harp, a 15th-century instrument of oak and willow, and a copy of the 1916 Proclamation. Since 2022 the building has been under a €90 million restoration focused on climate control and fire protection. The room also appears in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world.