Temple Bar has a daytime self most visitors never meet, because they arrive after dark when it's a different and louder animal. Come on a Saturday morning instead: the cobbles are quiet, the food market is on, and the galleries are open and empty.
Start in Meeting House Square at the food market — oysters, cheese, honey, eat as you walk — then duck into the Gallery of Photography on the south side for a free, hushed twenty minutes. The red Temple Bar pub on the corner is the most-photographed wall in the city; get your picture and move on, the pint inside is famously dear. Two streets toward the river, look up at the Sunlight Chambers frieze, terracotta washerwomen most people never notice.
From there it's a short climb to the lower yard of Dublin Castle, the medieval Record Tower squat among the Georgian rebuild, before you drop back to the water. End at the Ha'penny Bridge, the white iron arch that once charged a halfpenny to cross. The Jervis Luas is just over the river.
