Fountains Abbey Water Garden
Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Water Garden near Ripon in North Yorkshire is a UNESCO World Heritage Site combining the largest and most complete Cistercian abbey ruins in Britain with one of the finest and most innovative eighteenth-century landscape gardens in the world, a combination of medieval monastic grandeur and Georgian landscape design that together create a heritage experience of exceptional breadth and quality. The National Trust manages the entire site and the combination of the abbey ruins, the water garden and the Deer Park provides one of the most comprehensive heritage and landscape experiences available in the north of England.
The Cistercian abbey of Fountains, founded in 1132 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, grew over four centuries into one of the wealthiest monasteries in England, its extensive agricultural estate extending across much of the West Riding of Yorkshire in a business empire that provided the resources for the enormous building programme visible in the ruins. The surviving buildings, including the great nave of the abbey church, the cellarium and the remarkable fifteenth-century tower of Abbot Huby, represent the most complete picture of a major English Cistercian monastery available anywhere.
The eighteenth-century water garden created by John Aislabie in the valley below the abbey is one of the most accomplished examples of formal landscape design in England, its series of geometric canals and ponds, the Temple of Piety and the surprise view of the abbey from the crescent pond providing a sequence of composed views of remarkable quality.