Christ Church Cathedral

Christ Church was founded around 1030 under Sitric Silkenbeard, the Norse king of Dublin, and rebuilt in stone from the 1180s under Strongbow and the Norman archbishops. Its crypt, dating to that rebuilding, is the largest in Britain or Ireland and runs beneath the entire building - a low forest of piers holding the church up, and now displaying the cathedral's oddities: the stocks from the archbishop's court, medieval statues of Charles II and James II removed from the Tholsel, and a mummified cat and rat found in an organ pipe in the 1860s, which Joyce mentions in Finnegans Wake and which most visitors remember above everything else. The Victorian restoration by George Edmund Street was drastic, replacing much of the medieval fabric, so what stands is a nineteenth-century reconstruction of a medieval church, with genuine work in the crypt and transepts.

What you actually see

• The crypt - the largest in Britain or Ireland, running the building's length.
• The cat and the rat - mummified in an organ pipe, found in the 1860s.
• The Norman transepts - some of the surviving twelfth-century fabric.
• The Street restoration - the Victorian rebuild that shaped the exterior.

When to go

Any season; entirely indoors. It is a working cathedral, so services close parts of it - check the schedule. Mornings are quieter than afternoons.

Honest expectations

Much of what you see is Victorian reconstruction rather than medieval fabric. Ticketed, with a separate charge or combined ticket for Dublinia next door. Sections close for services without much notice.

Nearby

Dublinia adjoins the cathedral; Saint Patrick's Cathedral and Dublin Castle are a short walk.