The East Pier is a 2.6 km round trip, flat the whole way, with a cast-iron Victorian bandstand at the halfway mark and a working lighthouse at the end. If you have an hour in Dún Laoghaire (pronounced Dunleary), walk it – that single stroll, ice cream optional, is what the town has been built around since the 1820s. The rest is bonus: a free maritime museum, a restored sea-bathing enclosure, and boats that will take you across Dublin Bay to Howth.
A harbour built after a shipwreck
The name Dún Laoghaire means ‘fort of Laoghaire’, after the 5th-century High King Lóegaire mac Néill. For centuries this was a modest fishing village. Then in November 1807 two troopships wrecked in the bay during a storm with heavy loss of life, and the case for a proper ‘asylum harbour’ – a refuge for ships caught out in Dublin Bay – became impossible to ignore.
The engineer John Rennie drew up the design in 1817, and building work went on for decades. The two granite arms enclose one of the largest artificial harbours in the country: the East Pier is 2.6 km out and back, the West Pier a little over 3 km. When King George IV visited the works in 1821, the town was renamed Kingstown in his honour – a name it kept until August 1920, when it quietly took back its Irish one, months before the Irish Free State. What turned the port from an engineering project into a resort was Ireland’s first passenger railway, the Dublin and Kingstown line, which opened in 1834 and put the sea within a half-hour of the city.
Walking the piers
Both piers are open to the public and both are worth doing, but they are not the same walk. The East Pier is the popular one – level, sheltered, busy on a fine Sunday, with the bandstand, the lighthouse and long views back across the bay to Howth. The West Pier is longer, rougher underfoot and far quieter; go here if you want the harbour more or less to yourself and don’t mind a plainer surface. The sailing clubs – the Royal Irish and the National among them – cluster at the harbour end. One honest warning: both piers stick straight out into the bay with nothing to break a westerly, so on a raw day bring more coat than you think you need.
Beyond the harbour, Marine Parade runs east as a grassy promenade towards Scotsman’s Bay, the quieter stretch of shore. The Dún Laoghaire Baths reopened here in 2022 after a long closure, with a netted enclosure that lets you swim at any state of the tide – no waiting for the water to come in.
Parks, Culture & Local Life
The National Maritime Museum of Ireland sits in the former Mariners’ Church and is the best rainy-hour option in town. It tells the story of Irish seafaring through the real thing rather than screens – a recovered Titanic lightbulb, the anchor of the torpedoed mailboat Mollie – and entry is free. Nearby, the DLR Lexicon is the modern counterpoint: a public library and exhibition space with a café and a roof terrace over the water.
For green space, People’s Park is the town’s Victorian heart, free and open daily, with cast-iron fountains, a playground and a Sunday CoCo Market for crafts, baked goods and produce. Families now have two newer draws too: a pump track for bikes, skateboards and inline skates at Apna Park, open to all ages, and – a short walk out at Sandycove – a permanent sauna at the Sandycove Store & Yard, handy after a cold-water swim. If you want a longer outing on wheels, a traffic-free coastal cycle path runs roughly 5 km from the harbour to Booterstown, passing Seapoint, Monkstown and Blackrock.
On the water
The harbour is a genuine sailing base, not a decorative marina – Dún Laoghaire Marina is the largest in the country, and the clubs run racing all summer. Beginners can book courses at the Irish National Sailing School on the East Pier. For a trip without a tiller in your hand, Dublin Bay Cruises runs a 75-minute crossing to Howth, passing Dalkey Island, Ireland’s Eye and Lambay Island – the last of which, oddly, has a small colony of wallabies. Goat Boat Tours run guided wildlife and history trips with all-weather gear supplied, which tells you something about the reliability of the weather.
Food, drink and getting there
George’s Street is the spine of the town’s eating and shopping. Teddy’s, by the seafront, has been the ice-cream of choice for Dubliners for generations and is the traditional reward for finishing the pier. Beyond that you’ll find brunch spots, casual Italian at Ragazzi’s and Oliveto’s, and the Royal Marine Hotel, which has been putting up guests since 1865.
Getting here is the easy part. The DART runs along the coast from Dublin city centre south through Dalkey to Bray and Greystones, and most of the harbour attractions are within a ten-minute walk of the station – so there’s little reason to bring a car.
If you do drive, the town has a Christmas market worth timing a winter visit around: one of Dublin’s longest-running, set around the harbour and town centre, with a vintage carnival and a 55-foot Ferris wheel reportedly used in the film Grease.
Practical information
- Opening hours – The piers, promenade and National Maritime Museum are open year-round; People’s Park is open daily and the CoCo Market runs on Sundays.
- Admission – The museum, park and DLR Lexicon are free. Sailing lessons, boat tours and the sauna are paid.
- Parking – Pay and display at the harbour is €2.00 per hour (minimum €2), by card or the Parking Tag app; on-street parking nearby also runs through the app.
- Tourist information – The dlr tourist kiosk is at The Metals on Marine Road, outside Meadows & Byrne, open daily 10am–5pm (closed 1.30pm–2.30pm for lunch). Phone +353 1 280 6964 or email info@dlrtourism.ie.
- Accessibility – The East Pier is level and wheelchair-friendly; the National Maritime Museum and DLR Lexicon have step-free access.
Time a Sunday morning if you can: the CoCo Market is on, the East Pier fills up with walkers, and you can finish with an ice cream and the boats heading out across the bay.