4 Best Sights in Kells, Dublin Environs

Located in Kells Town Hall, the office is also home to a brilliant copy of the Book of Kells—it's a more pleasant, less rushed, and less expensive way to see this medieval masterpiece compared with the madness of Trinity College in high season. They also have a diorama of Kells Town around AD 815.

The nearly 100-foot-high Round Tower, adjacent to St. Colmcille's House, dates back to 1076 and is in almost perfect condition. The tower was likely used as a defensive hideout by local monks during an invasion; they would climb up the rope ladder with their valuables and pull it up after them. Its top story has five windows, not the usual four, each facing an ancient entrance into the medieval town. You can't go inside, but just standing beside it gives a real sense of the inventiveness and desperation of the Viking-fearing monks.

Similar in appearance to St. Kevin's Church at Glendalough and Cormac's Chapel at Cashel, St. Colmcille's House is an 11th-century church on a much older site. It measures about 24 feet square and nearly 40 feet high, with a steeply pitched stone roof. The nearby tourist office can help you get inside and it's well worth it to feel what the ancient monastic life was like.

Four elaborately carved High Crosses stand in the church graveyard; you'll find the stump of a fifth in the marketplace—it was used as a gallows during the 1798 uprising against British rule.