Castles · Tour

Early Access, and the Two Hundred Thousand Books of the Long Room

Eleventh-century archives called the Book of Kells the most precious object in the western world, and nothing since has argued with them. The problem is everyone else who wants to see it. This ticket gets you in early, ahead of the crowd, with a local English-speaking guide. The guide works through the exhibition Turning Darkness into Light, which covers where the book came from: the ornament, the symbolism worked into it, and the painting technique used to make it. The argument for it as a work of art gets made properly rather than asserted. After that, the Old Library at Trinity College and its vaulted Long Room, where 200,000 of the library's oldest books are shelved. A good many of them are treasures in their own right.