Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire, UK

June 2009

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, Dave's family introduced me to one of their favorite diversions not far from Harrogate.    Hauntingly beautiful and serene, the ruins of Fountains Abbey are nestled in a quiet valley.  After disputes and a riot in York, 13 monks left the Benedictine monastery in 1132 and came to this untamed area to set up a stricter order, following the French Cistercians.

The "white monks" wore scratchy, undyed wool, had long periods of silent meditation, and ate food only for sustenance--hardly the group you would expect to ultimately control the largest, wealthiest, and most famous monastery in Northern England.  But the lay brothers who took care of their million acres, flocks of sheep, and other monastic industries made it prosper.

Surviving financial upheavals and the black plague, the abbey finally succumbed to Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, and the lands were put into private hands.  Exquisite water gardens, a stately house, and a deer park were later added to the upstream Studley Royal Estate.

I was captivated by the shapes and forms, light and shadows of the ruins.  One could easily imagine the lay brothers going busily about their work in the still preserved cellarium while the silent monks looked up to God in their lofty sanctuaries.  I wandered so long among the ruins that I did not have time to finish my walk through the Studley Water Gardens before closing time and dusk, when the protected species of bats leave their nooks in the cellarium for their nightly feast.
Click on link for slideshow:
Fountains Abbey
Music:  Annonymous 4, The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bingen
For more information:  www.fountainsabbey.org.uk