While undoubtedly boasting the title of Dublin’s most beautiful landmark, the majestic Trinity College Dublin harbors many secrets. Established in the early 1500s, The TCD campus has had enough time to develop some strange superstitions, secrets, and legends. We’ve put together six of TCD’s odd happenings, underground locations, or arcane rules that are still technically in effect today.
These superstitions have been circling for decades, and are famously observed by even the most cynical of students. Have we left any out? The Campanile in the main quad at Trinity College. The superstition of the Campanile is perhaps the college’s most widely observed.
The Campanile is the bell tower, an iconic landmark, in the center of Front Square. You can gawk at its masterful architecture all day long, but you won’t soon catch a TCD student walking underneath it. As the superstition goes, if the bell tolls as you’re walking through, you will fail all of your exams.
On graduation day you may find groups of TCD graduates congregating by the Campanile, fearlessly taking the shortcut through campus that they’d been avoiding for years. Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! According to students there, the superstition has caught hold of even the most cynical. Student Hannah Popham said: “I can honestly only say I ever knew one person who was silly enough to do this.
And guess who failed Engineering Mathematics II that year?” Scholars .