Literary Dún Laoghaire: a self-guided walk

Dún Laoghaire has a denser literary connection than most Dublin suburbs, and you can take in the main points on foot in a morning. The anchor is the Martello tower at Sandycove, where the first chapter of Ulysses is set and where Joyce briefly lived. The walk below runs from there back towards the town, ending at the LexIcon library. Done at a steady pace with a tower visit it takes two to three hours.

Start: the James Joyce Tower and Museum, Sandycove

The squat granite Martello tower at Sandycove Point is where Joyce spent six nights in September 1904, as a guest of Oliver St John Gogarty, who rented it from the War Office. Joyce turned the stay and the company into the opening of Ulysses: the novel begins on the tower's gun platform with Buck Mulligan, the character Gogarty inspired. The tower is now a free museum holding Joyce letters, editions and personal items. It is generally open Thursday to Sunday, roughly 10am to 4pm, run by volunteers, so check the joycetower.ie listing before you set out and expect reduced or different hours off-season. On Bloomsday, 16 June, it opens early and draws a crowd in period dress. Inside, narrow internal stairs lead up to the gun platform and the same view across Dublin Bay that opens the book; the staircase makes it unsuitable for wheelchair users, though the exterior point is step-free.

Just below: the Forty Foot

A few steps from the tower is the Forty Foot bathing place, which also appears in that first chapter. Beckett is said to have learned to swim here. You do not need to get in to appreciate the spot, but it is worth the two-minute detour to see where Mulligan goes for his morning dip in the novel.

Walk the seafront towards town

From Sandycove the seafront path runs north-west towards Dún Laoghaire harbour, past Scotsman's Bay. It is flat, open and about a twenty-five-minute walk to the East Pier. This is the connective stretch of the route rather than a literary site in itself, but it is the same coastline these writers knew, and it sets up the next stop.

The East Pier: the Beckett plaque

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, a few kilometres inland, and the area runs through his work. The East Pier carries a plaque to him. The pier is widely associated with the pivotal vision scene in his play Krapp's Last Tape, in which the narrator recalls a moment of clarity during a storm; readers and scholars place that scene here, though Beckett was characteristically spare about pinning it down. Walk out to the bandstand at least, where the plaque and the open bay make the connection land better than any caption could. Beckett knew Joyce well: in Paris in the late 1920s he became part of Joyce's circle and helped him with work, before going on to a body of writing that pushed in the opposite direction to Joyce's abundance.

End: the dlr LexIcon

Finish at the LexIcon, the council library on Haigh Terrace above Moran Park, a short walk from the East Pier. It opened in 2015 and holds the borough's local-history and reference collections across several floors. The practical reward for a literary walker is the upper-floor reading rooms, which look out over the harbour and the bay; the building is free to enter and a good warm finish if the wind off the pier has done its work. Opening hours are generally Monday to Thursday until evening and shorter on Friday and Saturday, with Sunday closed, so it suits a Saturday version of this walk better than a Sunday one. Check the dlr libraries hours page before relying on it.

Practical notes

Take the DART to Sandycove and Glasthule to start at the tower, and pick it back up at Dún Laoghaire to leave. The route is one-directional and downhill in spirit, tower first, town last, which keeps the indoor finish at the LexIcon as a reward. Bring a windproof layer for the pier regardless of season. Everything on the route is free except an optional donation at the tower.