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Self Guided Tour of Dublin's Breweries and Back Alleys
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Most visitors to Dublin spend their time on the tourist trail between Trinity and Temple Bar and never make it down into the Liberties - which is exactly why this neighbourhood is worth your time. This is one of the oldest continuously inhabited parts of the city, and it carries centuries of history in its street layout, its church walls, and its back lanes.
Dublin-born guide Jack Redmond built this self-guided audio tour to tell the story of the Liberties properly. You start near the Obelisk Fountain and work through the medieval ruins of the area and the historic Coombe, once a centre for Huguenot weavers. Along the way you’ll encounter Irish rebel history, hear the story of Johnny 40 Coats, stop at Peace Park - which sits above a medieval graveyard - and learn how Arthur Guinness secured the lease on his famous brewery. You’ll also pass Marsh’s Library, Ireland’s oldest public library, where books were once chained to reading cages to prevent theft.
Your access is unlimited and lasts a lifetime - you can come back to this tour months later. Offline access to the audio, maps, and GPS data is included, so you don’t need to worry about mobile signal in the older streets.
Meeting point: The tour starts across the road from Christchurch Cathedral, next to the Lord Edward pub.
Download the audio and maps before you leave your accommodation. The Liberties has good mobile coverage on the main streets, but some of the older back lanes around St Audoen’s and the city wall section can be patchy. The offline access is included for a reason - use it and you won’t have any dead spots mid-story.
Give yourself more than the stated duration. The audio content alone takes about an hour, but the Liberties rewards slow walking. Marsh’s Library accepts visitors on weekdays and Saturday mornings, and stepping inside is genuinely worth the detour - the reading cages where books were chained are still intact and it’s one of the stranger and more beautiful rooms in Dublin.
The Guinness Open Gate Brewery at the end of the route is a different experience from the Storehouse. It’s the actual working brewery rather than the tourist attraction, and the tap room serves experimental and seasonal beers you won’t find anywhere else. It’s smaller, less crowded, and gives you a much better sense of what Guinness actually does beyond the heritage marketing.
Roe & Co Distillery, which you’ll pass on the tour, does excellent whiskey tastings. It’s housed in the old Guinness Power House building and the industrial architecture has been kept - worth a look inside if whiskey is your thing. They run tours and tastings throughout the day and you can usually walk in without a reservation during quieter periods.
The Old Dublin City Wall section near St Audoen’s is easy to miss if you’re not looking. There’s a surviving stretch of the medieval city wall built into the hillside there, and the audio tour explains its significance well, but the physical remnants are integrated into later buildings in a way that blurs into the background. Stand and listen to the full stop before you move on.