Phoenix Park: the monument, the cross and the deer
Europe's great enclosed park — the obelisk, the Papal Cross, a herd of wild fallow deer. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Wellington Monument
Start at the great obelisk just inside the Parkgate Street end — at over sixty metres, the tallest of its kind in Europe, built for the Dublin-born duke. The bronze panels around the base were cast from captured French cannon. Sit on the steps a minute; the whole park opens west from here.

2. Dublin Zoo edge and the People's Flower Gardens
The zoo's boundary and the formal Victorian flower gardens sit on the park's eastern shoulder. You don't have to pay in; the gardens with their lake and bandstand are free and quiet on a weekday morning. A gentle warm-up before the long straight.

3. Áras an Uachtaráin
The President's house — the Áras (pronounced 'AW-rass') — sits behind railings on the north side of the main road, a white Georgian lodge that was once the Viceregal Lodge. Free Saturday tours run from the visitor centre if you book; otherwise the view through the gates is the thing.

4. Papal Cross
A plain steel cross thirty-five metres high, raised on the Fifteen Acres for the 1979 papal Mass that drew over a million people — more than a quarter of the country. It looks stark and a little lonely on the open grass now, which is exactly why it's worth the walk out.

5. The fallow deer of the Fifteen Acres
A herd of wild fallow deer has grazed these open grasslands since the 1660s. They cluster on the Fifteen Acres and the Furze; keep your distance, especially in the autumn rut and the spring when fawns are hidden in the bracken. Don't feed them — it's the one rule the rangers actually enforce.

6. Magazine Fort, Thomas's Hill
The star-shaped powder fort on the bluff above the Liffey, built in the 1730s and raided for its arms in 1916 and again in 1939. Long derelict, slowly being conserved. Climb to it for the southward view over the river valley, then drop to the Chapelizod or Castleknock gate for the bus back.

Phoenix Park: the monument, the cross and the deer