Ulysses: One Day in Dublin

The novel opens here, and so does the route. Buck Mulligan comes up the stairhead with a bowl of lather, a mirror and a razor crossed on it, and blesses the tower, the land and the mountains three times; the rent is twelve pounds a year, paid to the secretary of state for war. Joyce himself spent six nights in this tower in 1904, and Oliver St John Gogarty is the model for the loud, mocking Buck. By the end of the episode Buck capers off down towards the Forty Foot, the sea bathing place a hundred metres away. The tower is a small Joyce museum now.

Visitor guidance: The Joyce Tower museum is open Thursday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., admission free; visits can be booked online for a small donation.

Sandymount Strand carries two of the eighteen episodes. In the morning Stephen Dedalus wanders it, asking himself whether he is walking into eternity along the strand. Later the same day Bloom sits on a rock here while three young women, Gerty MacDowell among them, sit on the rocks enjoying the evening air, and he watches Gerty from a distance. Today the strand is a long public beach with a Martello tower of 1804 about halfway along, and the concrete remains of the swimming baths built in 1883.

Visitor guidance: A public beach walk; the Martello tower of 1804 stands about halfway along it.

Bloom's morning errand brings him here to buy soap, and he knows exactly where to go: "Sweny's in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move." Later in the book the novel gives the full name of the shop, F. W. Sweny and Co, dispensing chemists. Lincoln Place is a short street that still runs along the southern boundary of Trinity College Dublin, and two of its buildings appear in Ulysses: the chemist's and the Victorian Turkish Baths, which were demolished in 1970.

Location precision: The novel names Sweny's on Lincoln Place but no house number, so the pin marks the street.

Visitor guidance: Lincoln Place is a short public street along the southern boundary of Trinity College Dublin.

Episode 6 is a funeral cortege, and this is the cemetery it crawls into: "The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze." Bloom rides in the carriage with Stephen's father among the mourners, his mind on his dead infant son Rudy and on his own father, and at the graveside the caretaker tells the party a story of two drunks who came out one foggy evening to look for a friend's grave. Prospect Cemetery was the old name of Glasnevin, taken from the townland around it; Daniel O'Connell opened the grounds in 1832 and they are still in use.

Location precision: The novel names Prospect Cemetery; the pin marks Glasnevin, the cemetery's present name, rather than any one grave.

Visitor guidance: Glasnevin is still an active cemetery, open to visitors on the north side of the city.

Bloom's lunch is modest: "A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?" — gorgonzola with mustard and a glass of burgundy, while Nosey Flynn greets him from his nook. The novel puts David Byrne's licensed premises at 14 Duke Street; Davy Byrne opened the pub in 1889, so it was there in 1904, and it stands at number 21 today. It has become a stop on the Ulysses pilgrimage, where readers order a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine just as Bloom did.

Visitor guidance: Still a working pub at 21 Duke Street.

Here Bloom and Stephen are in the same building and never quite meet. Stephen is well into his theory of Shakespeare and Hamlet when Buck Mulligan interrupts to read out the telegram Stephen sent him; Bloom is in the building too, looking up the advertisement he has been trying to place. "Must look up that ad in the national library." As the two of them leave, Bloom passes in between them. The library credits Joyce himself with setting the ninth episode here.

Visitor guidance: The Kildare Street building, opened in 1890 with its domed reading room, is open to visitors; check current opening times.

Episode 11 is set in the Ormond Hotel on the quay. From outside, the two barmaids' heads show above the hotel's crossblind, "gold by bronze". Bloom dines here, listening to Stephen's father and others sing and watching the barmaids. At the bar one asks the other whether Mr Boylan was in while she was upstairs — "No. He was not." Meanwhile Boylan's cab is jingling "from the bridge to Ormond quay" on its way to Molly.

Location precision: Joyce names the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay but not its frontage, so the pin marks the quay itself.

"National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street": the novel even names the building in a mock newspaper report. Mina Purefoy is in labour here — "Dr Horne got her in" — and episode 14 is partly set at the hospital, where Bloom and Stephen share drinks with the medical students. Before the episode ends, a son is born to Mina Purefoy. The hospital, founded in 1894, is still a working maternity hospital at the eastern corner of Merrion Square.

Visitor guidance: Holles Street Hospital, at the eastern corner of Merrion Square, is a working hospital — view it from the street.

The novel ends with Molly remembering the afternoon Bloom proposed to her, sixteen years and a leap year earlier: the day they lay among the rhododendrons on Howth Head, he in a grey tweed suit and straw hat, and he asked her to say yes. "He asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower." The hill is real, but the novel never says where on the head the two of them lay, so the pin marks Howth Head as a whole. There is a cliff walk over it today, and the Baily Lighthouse sits on the south-eastern shoulder.

Location precision: Molly's proposal is a recollection and the novel does not say where on the head they lay; the pin marks Howth Head as a whole.

Visitor guidance: The Cliff Walk is one of the routes over the head.