← All Dublin tours via Viator · From €7 · 1 hour 
Turtle Bunbury's Dublin: A Self-Guided Audio Tour from a Celebrated Author
3 traveller reviews Booked securely via Viator
Check availability & prices →
From €7 per person
Dublin has more than 1,200 years of history to draw on, and historian and author Turtle Bunbury is one of the best people you could have in your ear while you walk it. This self-guided audio tour covers a compact but genuinely fascinating stretch of the city - from St Stephen’s Green, through Merrion Square, all the way to Trinity College Dublin.
Along the route, Turtle introduces you to some extraordinary characters: Bernardo O’Higgins, Maurice Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and - yes - Paddy Hitler. You’ll hear about Vikings who became Normans, Frenchmen who fought for Ireland, and Irishmen who went to fight for Mexico. It’s a tour that takes Dublin seriously as a place with real, layered, sometimes very strange history, and Turtle tells it with the kind of ease that comes from spending decades in the subject.
You go at your own pace. Start, pause, and restart whenever you like.
The tour starts at the Wolfe Tone memorial near St Stephen’s Green. From there you’ll pass by the Huguenot Cemetery, O’Donoghue’s pub, the Merrion Hotel, the Department of the Taoiseach, the National Museum of Ireland, Leinster House, and through Merrion Square. You’ll stop at the Oscar Wilde Statue and the Oscar Wilde House, and pass by Kennedy’s Pub on the way toward Trinity College.
Meeting point: The Wolfe Tone memorial, near St Stephen’s Green. Before you arrive, install the VoiceMap app and enter the code from your confirmation ticket.
Download the tour before you head out. The VoiceMap app works offline once you’ve loaded the tour, so you won’t be fumbling with a signal on a busy street corner. It takes a minute or two to download, so do it at your hotel or over coffee beforehand.
Give yourself more than an hour. The tour itself runs about an hour, but this part of Dublin rewards slow walking. Merrion Square alone is worth a detour, and if the National Museum of Ireland is open, it’s free entry and right on your route. Factor in an extra thirty to sixty minutes if you want to dip inside anything.
O’Donoghue’s pub is on the route for a reason. It’s one of Dublin’s great traditional music pubs - the Dubliners started out there in the 1960s. You don’t need to stop, but if you’re passing in the early evening and hear music, it’s worth five minutes.
The area around Merrion Square is one of the best-preserved Georgian streetscapes in Europe. People fly past it on the way somewhere else. Turtle’s narration slows you down and makes you look at the doors, the ironwork, the scale of it - things that are easy to miss when you’re just walking.
Trinity College is a destination in itself after the tour ends. The Book of Kells and the Long Room in the Old Library are inside, and there’s usually a queue, so booking ahead is worth it if that’s on your list. Even without going inside, the Front Square is a good place to sit for a few minutes before you head on.