We’re delighted to invite you on a rare Sunday edition and a very special version, of our favourite walk, the Medieval Walls tour.   It’s a tour, it’s a treasure hunt of sorts, and it’s a window into another world.  It includes access into a least one site you’d perhaps never normally see.  And it takes place the afternoon of Sunday 17th May

What’s it about?

It’s hard to visualize today that Dublin was once a small yet densely packed Viking town, crouched behind a wooden stockade.

It’s even harder perhaps to visualize, or even credit today that Dublin then became a bustling walled medieval Anglo-Norman city, with mighty stone gates, castellated watch-towers, and the heads of traitors, often displayed on spikes.

Many of us are unaware of the long incident-packed history of fires, wars, rebellions,  plague visitations, a huge explosion, and even a huge foreign invasion, that marked the ancient city before the early modern period.
That’s partly because, apart from a few fragments, in the two cathedrals and around Dublin castle, Ireland’s capital appears to have lost nearly all evidence of its ancient past.

But in fact, there are clues aplenty.  When we learn how to read them, and when we know where to look.   That’s where we come in.
If you’d like to get some sense of how the old city stood then, and how it withstood this extraordinary, often violent history join our Medieval walk, starting 2pm Sunday 17^th of May.

Among other things we’ll walk the lines of the city walls, glance at the distant Viking past, show you how to read a two different types of map; how interpret city topography, and we’ll visit visit Dublin’s oldest continuously-operating church.

Among other tricks and treats,  we use facsimiles of Leonard Strangeway’s wonderful map of the old city.  So there’s a sense of the treasure hunt about this walk too.

You’ll learn how to decode place & street-names amid other clues, to knit the present to the past.

We are also delighted to confirm this week our collaboration with St Audoen’s Church and separately, very excitingly, by special permission of the OPW, that we’ll be going into into the ancient foundations of the old Powder Tower, buried and hidden, beneath the ground at Dublin Castle.

Basically what was already a great tour, has just got even better.   Try not to miss it.

Details and booking:  Our meeting place, at  1.55pm Sunday 17^th is on Essex Street West, where it meets Cow Lane  (outside the back of Smock Alley Theatre) but please note all tickets should be purchesd in advance of the tour please and presented just prior to start of walk please, beginning 2pm.  We recommend arrival at Essex Street west at 1.50pm or 1.55 latest – as we will be talking and touring by 2pm.  We very much look forward to seeing some of you there.

Please spread the word too, via shares, tweets and all them other new-fangled tricks.  and/or, just bring a friend.

Tickets (incl booking fee) €16.70.  The link to tickets is here.