Trinity College Dublin

Founded 1592. Ireland's oldest university, home of the Book of Kells.

Overview

Queen Elizabeth I chartered Trinity as the sole college of the University of Dublin, a structure that persists with Trinity as its only constituent. Its Long Room library, holding 200,000 of the oldest books, displays the ninth-century Book of Kells to a million visitors a year. Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett studied here, and Ernest Walton split the atom by accelerator in the physics basement, Ireland's only science Nobel. The campanile and Parliament Square sit opposite the Irish parliament on College Green. Women were admitted in 1904, early for the era.