Top 10 Monasteries in the United Kingdom
To understand monasticism in the United Kingdom you first have to understand a rupture. Between 1536 and 1541, Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries closed every religious house in England and Wales, seized their wealth, pensioned or scattered the monks, and stripped the buildings of lead, glass, and stone. Four centuries of monastic life ended in a handful of years. Scotland's houses fell later, to the Reformation of 1560. This is why so many of Britain's most magnificent monastic places are ruins — vast roofless churches standing in green valleys — while the country's living communities are almost all fresh foundations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made possible by Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and often begun by monks returning from continental exile. The ten sites below hold both halves of that story.
1. Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire
Fountains is the largest monastic ruin in Britain and the essential place to begin. Founded in 1132 in the wooded valley of the little River Skell by a breakaway band of Benedictines from St Mary's in York who wanted a stricter life, it became a Cistercian house and grew immensely wealthy on wool before its surrender to the crown in 1539. What survives is extraordinary in its completeness: the long nave, the soaring Perpendicular tower added by Abbot Marmaduke Huby around 1500, and the vaulted cellarium stretching more than ninety metres. Set within the eighteenth-century water garden of Studley Royal, it forms a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is cared for by the National Trust.
2. Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire
A few valleys east of Fountains lies Rievaulx, the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, founded in the same year of 1132 by monks sent from Clairvaux itself. Under its most famous abbot, Aelred, in the mid-twelfth century, the community swelled to perhaps 140 monks and several hundred lay brothers. Hemmed in by the steep sides of the Rye valley, its great church was unusually aligned almost north to south rather than the customary east to west. Dissolved in 1538, its shattered but graceful Early Gothic arches remain among the most beautiful ruins in England.
3. Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire
The gaunt Gothic shell on the clifftop above Whitby marks one of the oldest holy sites in England. Here, at a double monastery of monks and nuns, the Abbess Hild presided over the Synod of Whitby in 664, which aligned the Anglo-Saxon church with Roman practice on the dating of Easter. It was also home to Caedmon, the earliest English poet known by name. The visible ruins belong to the later Benedictine abbey rebuilt after the Norman Conquest and dissolved in 1539; their brooding silhouette famously helped inspire Bram Stoker's Dracula.
4. Lindisfarne Priory, Northumberland
Reached across a causeway that floods at high tide, Holy Island was a cradle of English Christianity. The monastery was founded in 635 by St Aidan, sent from Iona at the invitation of King Oswald, and became the home of St Cuthbert, whose cult drew pilgrims for centuries. Here too the Lindisfarne Gospels were created around the year 700, traditionally by the monk Eadfrith, one of the supreme achievements of insular art. A Viking raid in 793 shocked Christian Europe and was among the first recorded on the British mainland; it eventually drove the monks inland with Cuthbert's relics, which came to rest at Durham. The weathered red-stone ruins seen today are those of the later Norman priory, a cell of Durham, with its famous surviving "rainbow arch" spanning the crossing.
5. Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire
On the Welsh bank of the winding River Wye stands Tintern, founded in 1131 and the first Cistercian abbey in Wales. Its glory is the great church built in the decades around 1300, its west front and tracery windows still nearly full height though the roof and glass are long gone. Tintern surrendered early, in 1536, in the first wave of the Dissolution. In the late eighteenth century its ivy-clad walls became a touchstone of the Romantic movement, painted by J. M. W. Turner and celebrated in Wordsworth's meditative poem written a few miles above the abbey.
6. Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset
Few English ruins carry as much legend as Glastonbury. Once among the richest abbeys in the land, it became attached to a web of stories: the coming of Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, the flowering Glastonbury Thorn, and the monks' claim in 1191 to have discovered the graves of King Arthur and Guinevere. A devastating fire in 1184 destroyed the older buildings, prompting a grand rebuilding. The Dissolution ended it brutally in 1539, when the last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn, and quartered on nearby Glastonbury Tor. The fragmentary ruins now stand in quiet parkland.
7. Melrose Abbey, Scottish Borders
Founded in 1136 by King David I and settled by monks from Rievaulx, Melrose was the earliest Cistercian house in Scotland. Its position near the border made it a repeated casualty of Anglo-Scottish warfare, and much of what survives is fine fifteenth-century rebuilding after English armies burned it. The stonework is exceptionally rich, including a celebrated carving of a bagpipe-playing pig among the gargoyles. Melrose is best known as the reputed resting place of the embalmed heart of Robert the Bruce; a lead casket unearthed in the grounds was reburied here in 1998.
8. Iona Abbey, Argyll and Bute
Off the western tip of Mull, the small island of Iona holds a place in British Christianity out of all proportion to its size. The Irish monk Columba landed here in 563 and founded a monastery that became the springboard for the conversion of much of Scotland and northern England. Iona is a candidate for the origin of the Book of Kells and a traditional burial ground of early Scottish kings. The medieval Benedictine abbey fell into ruin after the Reformation but was restored from 1899; it is now the home of the ecumenical Iona Community, founded in 1938.
9. Pluscarden Abbey, Moray
Tucked in a quiet glen near Elgin, Pluscarden is a remarkable exception to the general ruin. Founded in 1230 by King Alexander II, it declined and was abandoned after the Reformation like every other Scottish house. In 1948, however, Benedictine monks arrived and began to restore the medieval buildings to their original purpose, and the community was raised to the rank of abbey in 1974. It is the only medieval monastery in Britain still inhabited by monks and used for the life it was built for, its restored choir once again filled with sung Latin plainchant.
10. Buckfast Abbey, Devon
Buckfast tells the story of monastic revival most vividly. A medieval abbey stood on this site by the River Dart until the Dissolution swept it away in 1539. In 1882 a small group of exiled French Benedictine monks settled on the ruins, and from 1907 they set about rebuilding the abbey church largely with their own hands — a handful of monks working stone by stone over three decades until its completion in 1938. Today it is a thriving community best known for its beekeeping, long led by the famous Brother Adam who bred the resilient Buckfast bee, and for the fortified tonic wine that still bears the abbey's name.
A living tradition
These ten only begin the map. Yorkshire alone holds further great ruins at Byland, Jervaulx, and Bolton, while the monastic revival that gave Britain Pluscarden and Buckfast also founded the living Benedictine communities and schools at Ampleforth in Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset, whose vast Gothic Revival churches answer the medieval ruins across the centuries. To trace your own route between the roofless abbeys and the working monasteries, from Holy Island to Iona to the valleys of the Wye and the Dart, explore them on the interactive map.