Fountains Abbey
Fountains Abbey in the valley of the River Skell in North Yorkshire is the largest and most complete ruined monastery in Britain, a Cistercian abbey of enormous scale and architectural ambition whose remains, together with the eighteenth-century water gardens of Studley Royal Park that surround them, form a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the outstanding heritage landscapes in England. The extent and quality of the surviving fabric give an impression of medieval monastic life and architecture that is unmatched anywhere else in the British Isles.
The abbey was founded in 1132 by a group of thirteen monks who left St Mary's Abbey in York following a dispute about the strictness of monastic observance and settled in this remote valley with the support of the Archbishop of York. From these desperate beginnings, sheltering under a great elm tree in winter before the first stone buildings were constructed, Fountains grew within a century to become the wealthiest Cistercian house in England, its prosperity sustained by vast sheep flocks grazing the uplands of Yorkshire and the wool trade they supported. That extraordinary wealth is written in the quality and scale of the surviving ruins.
The eleven-bay nave of the abbey church, the great tower added in the sixteenth century, the vaulted cellarium providing storage for the lay brothers who worked the abbey's farms and granges, and the complete range of monastic buildings including the chapter house, infirmary and guest houses together constitute the most complete suite of Cistercian monastic buildings surviving anywhere in the world. The Studley Royal water garden, created in the eighteenth century and incorporating the abbey ruins as a picturesque landscape feature, completes an ensemble of extraordinary richness.