It is dark as you enter. There are wonderful displays and historical notes around the room with so much information about the Book of Kells, the Book of Darrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Armagh that it takes an hour easy to take it all in.
I know I have to read more about the history of the books. It turns out there are 4 copies of the book which I did not know. They have two on display in the inner sanctum and the other two are safely stored away.
There is no photography allowed so I will try to find some public domain photos to add to the blog.
After we admired all the photos and tried to take in all the information in the first room we entered the inner sanctum which holds two copies of the Book in their protective glass box with its special lighting focusing on each book. It is all very theatrical but obviously necessary to protect the
books.
Marvelous! Fantastic! Incredibly beautiful!
Need I say more? Are you getting the idea that these are worth seeing?
Each book is opened to a different page and they change the pages every so often. One will show an Illustrated page and the other a text page. They were both so awesome. The colours were amazingly vibrant and clear. It looked like gold leaf on one of the pages that was displayed. For a 1200 year old book it really was remarkable. I have seen a few books on the book of Kells and the reproductions do not do the originals justice. I could have spent another hour in there but time was slipping away so we exited, reluctantly, to go and see the Long Library.
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