Dublin’s original medieval cathedral known as Christ Church which houses one of the greatest and stunning Crypts in Ireland and Britain was built in the 11th century. Christ Church is among the oldest and biggest cathedrals of its kind anywhere within the British Isles to host holy relics, magical tombs and irreplaceable medieval art.

For a millennium Christ Church has been Dublin’s first cathedral and seat of its archbishops. This cathedral is also where King Henry II received his first Holy Communion in 1171 , after having his archbishop St. Thomas Beckett killed in Canterbury Cathedral. We can only  imagine how tense the ceremony must have been.

In 1181, a decade later, the cathedral’s reconstruction began to swap out the wood for stone. It has had many refurbishments done since that reconstruction but the Crypt remains original. In this Crypt you can see Tom and Jerry, the mummified remains of a cat and mouse who got stuck in an organ pipe inside the cathedral.

The cat and mouse definitely left an impression on James Joyce as he mentioned them in his last greatest work , Finnegan’s Wake.