the james joyce museum

The James Tower in Sandycove is famous as the setting for the opening of James Joyce's Ulysses, now acclaimed as the greatest and most influential novel of the twentieth century.
Dramatically located on a cliff-top overlooking the sea, the tower stands eight miles south of Dublin on the coast road. It clearly impressed Joyce, whose brief stay here in 1904 inspired the opening of Ulysses.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan gazes out at the 'snotgreen' sea from this tower in the opening pages of Ulysses'. The description is drawn from James Joyce's own memories, for he stayed briefly in the tower with Buck Mulligan's original, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the surgeon and wit.
One of a series of Martello Towers build around Dublin in 1804 as a defensive measure against the threat of Napoleonic invasion, it was opened in 1962 as a museum devoted to the life and works of James Joyce, who is known worldwide as the writer most closely associated with his native Dublin. Joyce vividly recalled the tower and the nearby 'Forty-Foot' gentlemen's imposed exile in Europe over a decade after his Sandycove sojourn.