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Dublin A History of Ireland Tour
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From €39 per person
If you want to understand Ireland - really understand it - this 2.5-hour walking tour is one of the best ways to do it. Your expert local guide takes you through the whole sweep of Irish history, from ancient Celtic society right through to the birth of the modern Irish state, using the city itself as the classroom.
You start at Christ Church Cathedral, where the story of early Ireland begins. From there you follow the Viking settlers along the River Liffey before moving into the Anglo-Norman period at Dublin Castle - a site that served as military fortress, prison, treasury, and seat of English administration for 700 years. The tour then moves to College Green, where you’ll hear about the Irish Parliament and the Act of Union, before crossing to O’Connell Street for what most people find the emotional heart of the walk: the GPO, headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising. Your guide lays out the Rising and the road to Irish independence in clear, compelling terms. You finish at Trinity College and the National Museum of Ireland, where you can explore the exhibits at your own pace.
Groups of up to 25 people mean you can actually ask questions and hear the stories properly. There’s also an optional upgrade to guaranteed timed entry to the Book of Kells if you’d like to add that in.
Meeting point: Leonardo Hotel Dublin Christchurch, Christchurch Place, Dublin, D08 REK7. Meet your guide outside to the right of the hotel main entrance - please don’t block the entrance. Arrive 15 minutes before the scheduled start time.
Arrive a few minutes early and have a look around Christchurch Place. The cathedral itself is one of Dublin’s oldest buildings - the foundations go back to a Viking timber church around 1030 AD. Even from the outside, it sets the scene for what you’re about to hear on the tour.
The GPO stop tends to generate the most conversation. If you have family roots in Ireland or any connection to the 1916 Rising, mention it to your guide beforehand. They’ll often have more to say about specific regiments, names, and areas of the city that don’t make it into the main narrative.
Book of Kells tickets are genuinely worth the upgrade. The queues without a booking can eat up an hour or more in peak season. The optional guaranteed timed entry takes all of that stress away and lets you move straight in.
The National Museum of Ireland is free to enter, so if the tour’s end time leaves you with an afternoon, it’s worth going back. The Kingship and Sacrifice exhibition - with the Iron Age bog bodies - is particularly striking and ties in directly with what you’ll have just heard about ancient Celtic Ireland.
Comfortable footwear really does matter here. Dublin’s older streets are full of cobblestones, and the tour covers a good deal of ground across the city centre. The kind of shoes you’d wear for a long day of walking are exactly what you want.