The Royal Hospital Kilmainham

This guide to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin begins with cattle grazing on its lawns by the 1990s, then reaches back to 1680, when the Duke of Ormonde told his surveyor general William Robinson to model a home for aging soldiers on the Les Invalides he'd seen in Paris. For more than two centuries the building sheltered veterans of Waterloo, Crimea, India and Afghanistan, until the new Irish Free State took it over in 1922 and its last old soldier packed his bag for London. Start in the chapel in the North Wing, where the whole story began.