Georgian Dublin, spread around Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square on the southeast side of the centre, preserves the city's most graceful eighteenth-century streetscapes. Rows of red-brick townhouses with fanlight windows and brightly painted front doors line the squares, their private gardens now mostly opened as public parks.
The district is also the city's museum quarter. The National Gallery of Ireland, the National Museum of Archaeology with its Iron Age bog bodies and Celtic gold, and Leinster House, seat of the Irish parliament, all cluster here. Merrion Square itself is dotted with statues, including a reclining, mischievous Oscar Wilde gazing across at his childhood home.
Leafy, quiet, and architecturally rich, Georgian Dublin rewards an unhurried walk, ideally combined with an hour or two in one of the free national museums.