Unforgetable Fountains Abbey

We must leave the beautiful Lakes, the enchanting Dales, and the storybook Appleby behind us and move on to the tiny village of Grewelthorpe in North Yorkshire.

Grewelthorpe consists of a pub, some houses, a church, and a very charming duck pond skirted by a little green. It's a bit hard to interact with a town that has no store so I mostly leave early and return late.

Not far away, just outside Ripon which is six miles from Grewelthorpe, are the majestic ruins of Fountains Abbey, and the water gardens and deer park of Studley Royal.

This World Heritage site is a wonder to behold. It is reputed to be one of the largest and best preserved Cistercian abbeys in the country.

The abbey was founded in 1132 by a group of monks who'd had a bit of a set to with their fellows and were given their marching orders. The Archbishop of York came good with a plot of land in the Skell River valley for them to set up a monastery of their own, and they were admitted, within a few years, to the Cistercian Order, a very strict rule established in France some thirty odd years earlier.

They had a pretty hard time of it for a start because while they were quite good at praying, they were not much chop at building, or anything else very useful. The Archbishop sent along some practical help eventually, and building got under way.

The Cistercians, as an order, had a cunning plan to get all the tedious work seen to. They recruited lay brothers, who were illiterate peasants, to do it all, allowing them, the monks, to get on with hand writing copies of the Bible and such like.

Now in the 12th century it was very difficult to get into heaven it seems, and so to give yourself a sporting chance you needed to spread your wealth around in places that were likely to give you a foot in the door of the next world. The new order of monks soon attracted attention because of their austerity and piety, and so funds rolled in from those anxious to purchase a good seat in heaven.

Within 100 years it was one of the wealthiest religious houses in the country with vast land holdings stretching all the way to the Lake District. Their major industry was sheep farming, as wool was a much sort after commodity, but various other pursuits were filling the coffers as well.

The 14th century saw an economic downturn, and in the 15th century there was a decline in their free labour force of lay brothers. They weathered those storms and were still a wealthy and powerful abbey when, in 1539, Henry VIII shut them down along with all the other religious houses in the country, and snitched all their goodies.

Perhaps the substantial remains we see today is due to the fact that the abbey was not surrounded by a town, making it more difficult for the local population to make off with the stone of the walls to use for building materials, as happened in other places.

The ancient water-driven cornmill belonging to the abbey continued to function commercially right into the 20th century.

What a sight this ruin must be on a moonlit night when you might imagine ghostly monks filing silently down the stone stairs into the great abbey church for 2am prayers.