THERE IS no need to visit a museum if you want to see fossils from the dinosaur days. A new walking tour reveals them embedded in the stones of Dublin city’s streetscape.
The Dublin on the Rocks audio tour takes you to 16 stops along a route from the city walls at St Audoen’s Church in High Street and down into the city to St Stephen’s Green.
On the way, those who take the tour will see fossils from the Jurassic age, volcanic ash long ago pressed into stone and the 600 panes of glass embedded in the facade of Trinity College Dublin. “This is a new venture to develop a range of audio tours,” said journalist Mary Mulvihill who is using the audio tour approach to reveal Dublin’s secret history.
She described her tour as being “500 million years in the making”. It uses the latest technology, delivering the audio tour as a podcast directly to your phone or MP3 player. The launch is timed to coincide with Heritage Week, which sees special events revealing Ireland’s heritage planned for across the country.
Launching the podcast tour, Minister of State for Natural Resources Conor Lenihan praised it as a “great way to introduce scientific ideas to young people”.
“Dublin on the Rocks has nothing to do with the recession,” Mr Lenihan was quick to tell those assembled.
The full audio tour invites you to identify and touch various types of stone used in the construction of Dublin’s buildings, and explores the stone’s history and place of origin.
Features include the slate formed from compressed volcanic ash used to frame the windows of a Dame Street coffee shop. Then there are the 150 million-year-old fossils and “ancient desert stone” used in buildings around the city.
On Castle Street, listeners are invited to peer through a window and glimpse a piece of timber that formed part of the Elizabethan house which originally stood there.
The tour takes between 1½ and two hours depending on walking speed and how long you spend scrutinising the stones. The development of the podcast tours is supported by the Geological Survey of Ireland and the Heritage Council.
Tours can be downloaded from www.ingeniousireland.ie where you can listen to an extract for free or the full tour for €4.95.