St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

Almost everything most people believe about this building is wrong. It is not Catholic. It is not Dublin's cathedral. Its famous door probably did not give English the phrase everyone says it did. And the medieval interior you are admiring was largely rebuilt in the 1860s by a brewer, on guesswork, without records. What is entirely true is that Jonathan Swift is under the floor of the nave with the epitaph he wrote for himself, that it is the largest church in Ireland, and that it is one of the best hours in the city. This guide sorts the story from the stone.

Two cathedrals, one small city

Why there are two

Dublin has two medieval Church of Ireland cathedrals five minutes' walk apart, which is unusual anywhere in Europe. Christ Church was already the cathedral of the diocese when St Patrick's was raised to cathedral rank around 1191, and the two then spent three centuries in a slow institutional war over precedence, burials, fees and which one got to crown things — regulated, though hardly settled, by an agreement of 1300 called the Pacis Compositio.

The modern arrangement dates from after the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871. Christ Church kept the archbishop's seat and remains the diocesan cathedral. St Patrick's became the National Cathedral of the Church of Ireland, with a chapter drawn from all twelve dioceses on the island. So: St Patrick's is the bigger building and the national one; Christ Church is the senior one and the archbishop's. Neither is Catholic. Dublin's Roman Catholic cathedral is St Mary's Pro-Cathedral on Marlborough Street — “pro” meaning stand-in, because the archdiocese has never recovered a medieval cathedral of its own.

The building, and how much of it is medieval

There was a church here from at least the twelfth century, on an island between two branches of the River Poddle, which now runs in a culvert under the park outside. The present building is essentially of the thirteenth century, Early English Gothic, begun about 1220. It is 91 metres long, which makes it the largest church in Ireland.

Then in 1362 a fire took the north-west tower, and Archbishop Thomas Minot rebuilt it — Minot's Tower, 147 feet, with walls ten feet thick, partly collapsed again around 1394 and rebuilt once more. The granite spire on top is much later: George Semple's, added in 1749, and 101 feet in its own right.

Benjamin Lee Guinness, and the honest caveat

By the mid-nineteenth century the building was close to ruin. Between 1860 and 1865 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness paid for a total restoration out of his own pocket — something like £150,000, which the cathedral glosses as tens of millions today. He saved it. He also did something that would horrify any modern conservation officer.

He employed no antiquarian architect. He kept almost no records. He rebuilt on conjecture where evidence was missing, refaced much of the exterior, added the flying buttresses, removed the choir screen and the partition walls, and demolished medieval chantries. The north transept had been a separate parish church — St Nicholas Without — and the south transept the chapter house; he threw both back into the main volume to make the English-cathedral interior you now walk through.

The consequence is permanent: it is genuinely impossible to say how much of what you are looking at is thirteenth-century and how much is confident Victorian invention. That is not a reason to think less of the building. It is a reason to look at it accurately.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Door of Reconciliation

In the north transept hangs a rough medieval oak door with a hole hacked through the middle of it, and it is the object everyone comes for.

The story: in 1492 the Butlers of Ormond and the FitzGeralds of Kildare were fighting over the Lord Deputyship of Ireland. The Butlers, getting the worst of it, took sanctuary in the chapter house and barricaded the door. Gerald FitzGerald, wanting the quarrel ended, had a hole cut in the door and pushed his own arm through it to offer his hand — unable to see whether the man on the other side would take it or take the arm off. It was taken. The families made peace.

The cathedral says this is where the phrase “to chance your arm” comes from, and every guidebook and tour repeats it. It is worth knowing that the lexicographers do not agree: the phrase is not recorded until the nineteenth century, where it belongs to British military and sporting slang, and the arm is the sleeve carrying your stripes. There is no evidential chain back to 1492. The door is real, the reconciliation is documented, and the etymology is folklore. All three of those things can be true at once.

Jonathan Swift

Swift was Dean here from 1713 to 1745, which he regarded as an exile from London and which turned him into the greatest satirist in the language and, in Dublin, a genuine popular hero for his pamphlets against English economic policy. He is buried in the nave, on the south side, under a brass plate in the floor. Esther Johnson — “Stella”, the woman he may or may not have married and never explained — lies beside him. She died in January 1728, seventeen years before him.

On the wall above is the Latin epitaph he wrote for himself, cut in black Kilkenny marble. Its central line is Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit — where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more. W. B. Yeats thought it the greatest epitaph in history and translated it:

Swift has sailed into his rest; / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast. / Imitate him if you dare, / World-besotted traveller; he / Served human liberty.

Nearby, in a case, are two death masks and a cast of Swift's skull, his own pulpit, and the communion table from his earlier church at Laracor. The masks are worth a minute: the story that Swift went mad has followed him for three centuries, and the modern reading — first proposed by Sir William Wilde, Oscar's father — is that he had Ménière's disease, whose vertigo and deafness were mistaken for insanity.

The Boyle Monument

A vast tiered wedding cake of painted stone in the north-west corner, put up in 1632 by Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, to his second wife Catherine Fenton, and covered in sixteen members of his family in coloured stone.

It originally stood behind the high altar, which caused one of the great rows of seventeenth-century Ireland. Thomas Wentworth, the Lord Deputy, took the view that a layman's family monument had no business standing where the altar should be, and ordered it moved. Boyle was enraged and never forgave him; the feud fed directly into Wentworth's impeachment and execution in 1641. Look at the bottom row: the kneeling child on the left is Robert Boyle, who grew up to formulate Boyle's Law.

The choir, and the banners

The choir is hung with heraldic banners, helmets and swords, and they are a frozen moment rather than a display. The Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick was founded by George III in 1783 as Ireland's equivalent of the Garter, and this cathedral was its chapel until 1871. When the order's connection ended, the banners of the knights as they stood in that year were left in place, and they are still there — a room full of the arms of men who were alive in 1871 and have not been touched since. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, is among them.

The choir school, and the Messiah

The choir school was founded in 1432 and still sings. Its best-known moment came on 13 April 1742, when members of the choirs of both St Patrick's and Christ Church sang in the world premiere of Handel's Messiah.

Two corrections to the version usually told. It did not happen in this building — it was at Neal's New Music Hall on Fishamble Street, a few minutes away, in aid of Mercer's Hospital, the Charitable Infirmary and the release of debtors from prison. And Swift, as Dean, initially refused to let his singers perform in a public music hall at all, and withdrew permission before relenting. The greatest sacred work in English very nearly went on without the cathedral's choir because the Dean disapproved of the venue.

The tiled floors

Look down in the choir and the nave. The encaustic tiles are Guinness-era, laid in the 1860s restoration and copied from medieval examples found in the building during the works — so they are Victorian objects reproducing genuine medieval patterns, which is a fair summary of the whole restoration in miniature.

The Lady Chapel and the Huguenots

At the east end, beyond the choir, the Lady Chapel was granted in 1666 to Dublin's French-speaking Huguenot refugees as L'Église Française de St Patrick. They worshipped here in French for a hundred and fifty years, until 1816. Among the monuments is Dr Elie Bouhéreau, a Huguenot refugee who became the first librarian of Marsh's Library next door — which is the other half of the joint ticket, and which you should take.

The Celtic slabs and the well

Displayed inside are several early Christian cross-carved grave slabs and an old granite baptismal stone. They were found in 1901 in the park outside, when the site of St Patrick's Well was located — the spring at which Patrick himself is supposed to have baptised converts, and the reason there is a church on this awkward, low, flood-prone island at all. One of the slabs is said to have covered the well. They are the oldest things in the building by several centuries and they get about a tenth of the attention the door gets.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Door of Reconciliation North transept: a real medieval door with a real hole in it, and a story that is documented even if the etymology attached to it is not.
• Swift's epitaph The one he wrote himself, and Yeats's translation of it beside the brass plate in the nave floor.
• Swift's death masks and skull cast In a case near the grave — and the Ménière's diagnosis that undid three centuries of "mad Dean" stories.
• Robert Boyle as a kneeling child Bottom row of the Boyle Monument: the future author of Boyle's Law, aged about five.
• The Knights of St Patrick banners Left exactly as they hung in 1871, when the order's connection with the cathedral ended.
• The Celtic grave slabs Early Christian carved stones found at St Patrick's Well in 1901 — older than everything else here and almost entirely ignored.
• The Lady Chapel A French-speaking Huguenot parish church inside an Irish cathedral for 150 years.
• Marsh's Library Not in the cathedral, but 30 seconds away and on the joint ticket. Do not skip it.

Insider tips

Do both cathedrals in one go. Christ Church is five minutes' walk and has the crypt — the largest in Ireland, with the mummified cat and rat found in an organ pipe, and Strongbow's tomb. Doing one without the other is missing the point of Dublin's odd double arrangement.

Avoid Sunday unless you are coming to worship. The building opens in three short windows around services and it is easy to arrive in one of the gaps.

Take the free tour. It is included, it runs twice a day Monday to Saturday, and almost nobody at the ticket desk is told about it.

Give the park ten minutes on the way out. St Patrick's Park is on the site of the medieval liberties and the well, and the Literary Parade along its wall commemorates the Dublin writers — Swift among them — better than most museums manage.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The cathedral sits in the Liberties, the oldest part of Dublin outside the Norman walls, which is where the Guinness brewery is and where the city's best recent food and drink has appeared. Staying here is cheaper than Temple Bar and considerably more pleasant; walk north for five minutes and you are in the centre.

More Irish churches

• Christ Church Cathedral — the other one, five minutes away, with the crypt and the cat.
• Rock of Cashel — the greatest medieval site in Ireland, on a limestone outcrop in Tipperary.
• Skellig Michael — a monastery on a rock in the Atlantic, if you can get a boat.

See all the Irish churches in this guide →