Trade through the port of Dublin has driven the prosperity of the city for a thousand years. In tracking the history of Dublin Port, Ian Elliot splices the story of its development with the age-long search for accurate ways of measuring time that would allow seafarers to navigate safely across oceans. As ancient water clocks evolved into atomic clocks, Dublin Port was transformed too. He delves into time, clocks and navigation, the Dunsink Observatory and its astronomy, atomic time and the global positioning system, and much more.

In this richly illustrated book, Elliot tells the story of Dublin port's visionary public servants and engineers, and of the pioneering astronomers and stargazers whose life work molded a perilous medieval landfall into a modern, living port.