This is what spending the night at Trinity College feels like

Times

04-07-2025

As you step through the gates, the clamour of the city slips away behind you. Inside the cobbled quadrangle of Trinity College Dublin, the air feels older, heavier, and the hush has a faintly illicit quality — as though you've wandered into a part of the city where you're not allowed to be, which is, of course, the allure.
Each summer Trinity opens its student accommodation to the public, a canny blend of tourist-savvy pragmatism and romantic fantasy. For a night (or several), you can sleep within the same walls as Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Bram Stoker. You can walk the same quads once stalked by the revolutionaries Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, both famously banished from the university for their radical politics.
Founded in 1592 under a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I, Trinity is Ireland's oldest surviving seat of learning. But its story runs deeper than mortar and manuscript. For centuries, it stood as a symbol of colonial power — a bastion of Protestant ascendancy that excluded Catholics until 1793, when legal reforms lifted the bar on admission. Even then, however, Trinity remained an enclave of elite privilege and exclusivity.
The architecture offers a trace of this hauteur. At the heart of the campus stands a statue of George Salmon, a former provost who famously declared that women would be admitted to Trinity 'over my dead body'. As fate would have it, Salmon died in 1904, and women were admitted that year.
Despite the grandeur, checking in for the night is a briskly modern, informal affair in a carpeted office just off Trinity's Parliament Square, staffed by unfailingly polite students in blue polo shirts. No need to queue again on your way out — simply leave your key behind.
My room was in the Rubrics, the college's oldest building, completed in about 1701 and standing like a red-brick sentry over the cobbles. Inside, it's less Downton Abbey, more out-of-town Ikea — pale woods, clean lines and a minimalist finish that nods to the past without indulging it. Accessibility, as you might expect from an 18th-century building, is limited: no lift, steep stairs and only a handful of ground-floor rooms.
The sash windows in the room framed a postcard view of the square below, and although mere steps from the city's main arteries, the night passed in ecclesiastical silence.
By day, the campus teems with tour groups and lounging Gen Zs basking in the sun behind the Campanile. The overall effect is oddly cinematic — think Normal People meets Harry Potter, with accents from every corner of the globe.
Breakfast is served from 7.30am to 10am downstairs in the college's subterranean canteen — a utilitarian space that contrasts sharply with the splendour above ground, but delivers a solid buffet of hot food, fruit, cereals and pastries. It's certainly not the Hogwarts grand hall, but the buffet is hearty and the coffee strong — enough to set up even the fussiest eaters for a day of exploring Dublin.
Trinity's location is, however, its trump card. It sits squarely in the city's cultural and retail core, just a three-minute walk from Grafton Street with its buskers and boutiques, and a stone's throw from some of Dublin's renowned pubs. James Joyce fans will know that the short stroll from Trinity's gates to Grafton Street retraces the author's first meeting with Nora Barnacle in June 1904 — the courtship that inspired Ulysses and Bloomsday.
Still, wandering the quad after dusk, I couldn't shake the feeling that the college had more secrets than it let on. As a history lover, I found the official campus tour a touch too tidy. Yes, it covers the essentials — the Long Room, the Book of Kells, a look inside the Museum Building and an impressive roll call of alumni, but it largely sidesteps the stranger, darker stories.
Take Edward Ford, for instance, a fellow of the college who met his end in the Rubrics, just two doors down from my room, in 1734. Annoyed by a group of students carousing outside his quarters, he reportedly demanded quiet — at which point they fired a musket through his door, fatally injuring the infamous disciplinarian. The tale is well documented but conspicuously absent from the official script. Perhaps it has been scrubbed to avoid alarming more delicate guests — but for lovers of dark tourism or true crime, it's a chilling reminder of how thin the walls of history really are.
Would I stay a week? Unlikely. The magic lies in the brevity — and in the quiet sense of trespass. One night is enough to flirt with one's long-lost student self, to soak in the scholarly hush of cloisters and centuries-old setting. It's not luxurious. It's not flashy. But it is quietly profound — like bedding down inside the mind of the city itself, all faded grandeur, fierce intellect and ghosts who never quite left.
Details Trinity College Dublin offers summer accommodation until August 30, room-only from €91 a night; visittrinity.ie