When Trinity College was established in 1592, it was built on the grounds of All Hallows Priory, a religious house that had stood outside the old city walls of Dublin. The priory was cleared almost entirely to make way for the new institution, with a single exception: its steeple was left standing amid the new construction. That detail alone gives a small but telling sense of how the college came into being, not as a careful act of preservation, but as a deliberate replacement of one kind of institution with another.

The founding of Trinity occurred during the reign of Elizabeth I, on lands that had already passed through significant change following the dissolution of the monasteries earlier in the sixteenth century. The priory of All Hallows, an Augustinian house, had its buildings largely demolished once the college project got underway. The earliest known layout of the college is preserved in what is referred to as the Hatfield Plan, a document that shows the original college buildings arranged around a quadrangle, the standard collegiate model of the period in which a series of buildings enclose a central courtyard. Historian J. W. De Courcy drew on this plan in his 1996 work to reconstruct how the early college was configured and how it related to the priory site it replaced.

The college grounds sit in what is now a central and busy part of Dublin city, easily reached on foot from most parts of the south inner city. The main entrance on College Green opens onto the cobbled Front Square, and while the present buildings date from various later centuries, the underlying logic of the quadrangle layout described in the Hatfield Plan is still broadly legible as you move through the campus. Visitors can walk freely through much of the grounds during the day, and the college's public areas include the Old Library, which houses the Book of Kells. For those interested in the layers beneath the Georgian facades, it is worth pausing to consider that the ground underfoot was once a medieval priory precinct, and that the steeple which survived the original clearance has long since vanished too, leaving almost nothing visible of what came before.