Sacred place · Medieval
Inis Cathaigh
County Clare
Inis Cathaigh, or Scattery Island, preserves a major early Christian monastery, round tower and later military battery at the strategic mouth of th…
- Near Kilrush
- Some walking
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Caves, wells and early Christian sites where worship and pilgrimage left their mark.
Page 1 of 14. Browsing 100 of 4619 — searching looks across all of them.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Denny Abbey
Cambridgeshire
Three unrelated religious orders in turn occupied the same buildings, and a countess who founded a Cambridge college is buried somewhere beneath th…
- Near Waterbeach
- Easy path
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
The Pipers, St Buryan
Cornwall
The Pipers near St Buryan are two exceptionally tall standing stones aligned toward the Merry Maidens, preserving a distinctive component of Penwit…
- Near St Buryan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Skellig Michael
County Kerry
A monastery of dry-stone beehive cells on a bare Atlantic crag, eleven kilometres out and six hundred steps up, built by monks who chose the least…
- Near Portmagee
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stonehenge
Wiltshire
Its bluestones were hauled some 150 miles from Wales, and its Altar Stone has now been traced to Scotland, 700 km away: proof of a Neolithic (the f…
- Near Amesbury
- 2.4 km from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Elgin Cathedral
Moray
Known as the Lantern of the North, it was Scotland's second-largest medieval cathedral and uniquely combined an English-style octagonal chapter hou…
- Near Elgin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Strata Florida Abbey
Ceredigion
A Cistercian abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) founded in 1164 that became a dynastic burial place, a centre for Welsh chronicles…
- Near Pontrhydfendigaid
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ballymeanoch Standing Stones and Henge
Argyll and Bute
One of the few places in Kilmartin Glen where a stone avenue, a circle and a henge: a circular enclosure from before any written account of Britain…
- Near Kilmartin
- 6 min walk from car park
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cairnpapple Hill
West Lothian
Cairnpapple Hill, on a dominating summit 312 metres above sea level with views from coast to coast in central lowland Scotland, was used and re-use…
- Near Bathgate
- 264 metres from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Calanais Standing Stones
Outer Hebrides
Erected around 2750 BC, before Stonehenge, and laid out so that none of its three stone rows actually points at the centre of its own circle.
- Near Calanais
- 107 metres from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Croft Moraig Stone Circle
Perth and Kinross
Croft Moraig is a complex multi-phase monument. Excavation in 1965 revealed three phases of construction: first a horseshoe of fourteen timber post…
- Near Kenmore
- 3.1 km from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Laggangairn Standing Stones
Dumfries and Galloway
Laggangairn’s stones link a setting from before written records reached Britain to early Christian crosses and a medieval Whithorn pilgrimage route…
- Near Newton Stewart
- 164 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle
Aberdeenshire
One of only a handful of Aberdeenshire recumbent circles with every stone still standing, its granite ring encloses a cairn (a mound of piled stone…
- Near Daviot
- 3 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ring of Brodgar
Orkney Islands
The Ring of Brodgar is a stone circle on the narrow isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray on Mainland, Orkney.
- Near Stenness
- 5 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Ninian's Cave
Dumfries and Galloway
St Ninian’s Cave is a Catholic pilgrimage site in Physgill Glen where early-medieval carved stones, rockfall-altered geology and modern film histor…
- Near Whithorn
- 25 min walk from car park
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stones of Stenness Circle and Henge
Orkney Islands
An ancient monument five miles north-east of Stromness that may be the oldest circular enclosure in the British Isles.
- Near Stenness
- 2 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Temple Wood Stone Circles
Argyll and Bute
At the centre of the southern circle at Temple Wood lies a burial cist (a grave lined and capped with stone slabs), ringed by a smaller circle of s…
- Near Kilmartin
- 8 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Whithorn Priory and Museum
Dumfries and Galloway
Whithorn was the location of the first recorded Christian church in Scotland: Candida Casa, the 'White/Shining House': built by Saint Ninian around…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Sacred place · Medieval
6 Ellerdale Road
Greater London
Richard Norman Shaw built this house for himself, without a client to please, and used it to demonstrate the Queen Anne style he helped popularise…
- Near Hampstead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey Gardens
Greater London
A community garden in Stratford grows vegetables and flowers directly above the buried gatehouse of a vanished medieval abbey (a self-governing mon…
- Near Stratford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of Kells
County Meath
For centuries this monastery sheltered, and perhaps helped create, the Book of Kells -- one of the finest illuminated gospel books to survive from…
- Near Kells
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of St Mary, St Dogmaels
Pembrokeshire
The west wall and north cross-arm of a twelfth-century monastic house beside the Teifi, with a detached medieval infirmary nearby.
- Near St Dogmaels
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr
County Dublin
Once one of Ireland's wealthiest religious houses, its canons taxed every barrel of Dublin ale and ran the city's water supply: yet nothing of it s…
- Near Dublin
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of the Order of St Clare
city-of-london
The Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare gave the Minories its name; after the Crown closed it in 1539, its chapel became Holy Trinity church and ot…
- Near London
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbotsbury Abbey
Dorset
Stone fragments, a great barn and St Catherine's Chapel keep Abbotsbury Abbey visible in the Dorset village it once dominated. Abbotsbury Abbey was…
- Near Abbotsbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbotskerswell Priory
Devon
A community of nuns fled revolutionary France, was exiled twice more, and only found permanent refuge here in a convent built with its own escape t…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abingdon Abbey
Oxfordshire
Timber-framed abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) buildings and gateways still thread through Abingdon where the great church has vanished. Abin…
- Near Abingdon-on-Thames
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aghaboe Abbey
County Laois
One of its own monks became a canonised bishop who built Salzburg Cathedral: a direct medieval thread from a small Irish valley to the heart of the…
- Near Portlaoise
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Aikey Brae stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Its 21.5-tonne recumbent stone ranks among the heaviest in Aberdeenshire, yet a 2001 dig returned a puzzling late radiocarbon date that unsettles t…
- Near Old Deer
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alberbury Priory
Shropshire
A house of seven monks that lost two priors to murder allegations within five years, and was dissolved a century before the Dissolution, the closur…
- Near Alberbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alcester Abbey
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house of 1138 with estates as far off as Dorset, annexed by Evesham Abbey in 1467 and left with almost nothing to mark it.
- Near Alcester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
All Saints Church, Segenhoe
Bedfordshire
Cobblestone walls raised soon after the Norman Conquest still stand, telling of a parish that outgrew its old church - yet never stopped burying it…
- Near Ridgmont
- Easy path
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Sacred place
All Saints Pastoral Centre
Hertfordshire
A convent chapel where two generations of one architect family worked forty years apart, now standing empty and named among the UK's most endangere…
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Sacred place · Medieval
All Saints' Church, Llangar
Denbighshire
Its wall paintings show the seven deadly sins each riding an animal, a device found in only three churches in Britain, and its abandonment in 1856…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alnesbourne Priory
Suffolk
A small Augustinian house near Nacton above the Orwell, probably founded in the thirteenth century.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alnwick Abbey
Northumberland
Alnwick Abbey’s surviving gatehouse gives tangible scale to a Premonstratensian community whose medieval hospitality served nobles, gentry and more…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alton Abbey
Hampshire
A monastery whose roots lay in the ports of Burma and India, caring for destitute seafarers long before it settled into a Hampshire hillside for ov…
- Near Alton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alvecote Priory
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house founded in 1159 as penance, according to the story attached to it, by a crusader who had accused his wife falsely and killed th…
- Near Alvecote
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Alvingham Priory
Lincolnshire
A priory, a monastery run by a prior, split down the middle by its own church wall, where canons and nuns lived under one roof but never met: Engla…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Sacred place
Amaravati Buddhist Monastery
Hertfordshire
A Thai Forest Tradition monastery built inside abandoned Second World War military huts of Canadian cedar, still run entirely on donations from lay…
- Near Hertford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Amesbury Abbey
Wiltshire
One of only four English houses of the Order of Fontevraud, and burial place of a queen consort and a captive princess of royal blood.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Amesbury Priory
Wiltshire
A royal nunnery where queens and princesses took the veil, run under a French order in which the resident monks answered to a prioress rather than…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ampleforth Abbey
North Yorkshire
A working Benedictine monastery whose community traces an unbroken line back to pre-Reformation (the sixteenth-century break with the Roman Church)…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Andover Priory
Hampshire
Andover's monks answered to a French abbey on the Loire, not an English house: a foreign tie that made it vulnerable and saw it suppressed in 1414,…
- Near Andover
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Anglesey Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A medieval priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: has its chapter house and monks' day room folded whole into a Jacobean-then-…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ankerwycke Priory
Berkshire
A small, poor house of Benedictine nuns whose 1197 case against a runaway sister reached the Pope himself, and whose site still bears a Tudor manor…
- Near Wraysbury
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Appleby Friary
Cumbria
The friars who lived here left named patrons and a firm founding date in the record, yet the ground itself has vanished entirely: only a borrowed n…
- Near Appleby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Appuldurcombe House
Isle of Wight
Appuldurcombe House is the shell of an ambitious Worsley Baroque mansion whose 18th-century architecture, Capability Brown landscape and celebrated…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Aquhorthies stone circle
Aberdeenshire
One of Aberdeenshire's recumbent stone circles built with two rings rather than one, its unusual forecourt and alternating stone heights have puzzl…
- Near Inverurie
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Arbor Low
Derbyshire
Rare among British henges for how completely its earthworks and stone circle survive together, with a linked Bronze Age, roughly 2500–800 BC, barro…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Arbroath Abbey
Angus
In 1320 the Declaration of Scottish Independence: the Declaration of Arbroath: is believed to have been drafted here by Abbot Bernard, Chancellor o…
- Near Arbroath
- Easy path
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Carved stone · Medieval
Ardboe High Cross
County Tyrone
At 5.6 metres, Ardboe High Cross is Northern Ireland’s tallest and most complete original high cross; its twenty-two biblical panels preserve the o…
- Near Cookstown
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ardfert Abbey
County Kerry
Nine tall lancet windows run along the south wall of the friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them)…
- Near Ardfert
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ardnadam Farm
Argyll and Bute
A field on the Cowal shore where a Neolithic tomb was read by nineteenth-century antiquarians as a Druidical altar, and by local tradition as the g…
- Near Dunoon
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ascot Priory
Berkshire
The mother house of an entire Anglican sisterhood, founded to serve seafaring Devonport's poor before it ever stood in Berkshire woodland.
- Near Ascot
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ashridge Priory
Hertfordshire
A future queen was arrested here as a suspected traitor, and the order that built the place traced its odd double name to whispers of a French heresy.
- Near Hertford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Askeaton Abbey
County Limerick
The east-bank ruin north of Askeaton combines a church with domestic ranges; records differ over which FitzGerald earl founded the Franciscan commu…
- Near Askeaton
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Athassel Priory
County Tipperary
At roughly 1.6 hectares, this is the largest medieval priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a religious communit…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Athelney Abbey
Somerset
Founded by King Alfred after his refuge in the Somerset marshes, this Benedictine abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) endured for centuries befo…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Athenry Abbey
County Galway
Athenry Abbey is a Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose substantial church and tombs preserve centuries of p…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Athy Priory
County Kildare
A Dominican house refounded twice after suppression, its friars returning in the 1620s and again in the 1750s to keep an unbroken thread running to…
- Near Athy
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Aubrey holes
Wiltshire
A precise ring of 56 buried pits older than Stonehenge's famous stones, and later reused as Britain's oldest known cremation cemetery.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Auld Bourtreebush
Aberdeenshire
Long dismissed as a recumbent stone circle like its neighbour at Aquhorthies, modern scholarship has overturned that reading, restoring Auld Bourtr…
- Near Portlethen
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friars, London
City of London
Thomas Cromwell built one of London's grandest private mansions on land seized from this friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among t…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friary, Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
Two Cambridge friars who once lived here, Robert Barnes and Myles Coverdale, went on to help drive the English Reformation, and the only book known…
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Avebury
Wiltshire
Huge standing stones rise among cottages, lanes and open grass, making Avebury feel less like a monument beside a village than a village caught ins…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Avebury Priory
Wiltshire
One of only two English cells of a Norman abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: sending its rents and tithes back to Boscherville for four centuri…
- Near Avebury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Axholme Charterhouse
Lincolnshire
Its last prior, Augustine Webster, chose the Tower of London and martyrdom over the Oath of Supremacy: a small Carthusian house whose ending produc…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Badbury Rings
Dorset
Badbury Rings preserves early burial mounds, a large defended settlement, Roman activity and later reuse on a chalk ridge above the Stour valley.
- Near Shapwick
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Balbirnie Stone Circle
Fife
A circle of which only five stones stood when excavation began in 1970, four more stumps and a tenth socket being found beneath.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Balfarg
Fife
Balfarg preserves a multi-phase Neolithic (the late Stone Age, about 4000–2500 BC in Britain) ceremonial landscape within modern Glenrothes, includ…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Balgarthno Stone Circle
dundee-city
Nine stones on a circle six and a half metres across, all but one of them down, with a causeway running thirty metres east: surrounded now by the h…
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of Woney
County Limerick
In 1205 Theobald Walter, chief butler of Ireland and brother of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, granted the entire "feodum" of Woodenikuwi…
- Near Kildimo
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbeydorney Abbey
County Kerry
The Cistercians who settled at Abbeydorney gave their house a Greek name, Kyrie Eleison, or Lord Have Mercy. The choice followed the order's habit…
- Near Abbeydorney
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aconbury Priory
Herefordshire
A standing church at Aconbury preserves the clearest trace of a vanished priory: a medieval religious house governed by a prior or prioress: founde…
- Near Aconbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Adare Friary
County Limerick
Robert Thompson's thumbnail-sized carved mouse sits on the lectern base inside St Nicholas' Church of Ireland parish church in Adare. The small mod…
- Near Adare
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aghalurcher Monastery
County Fermanagh
Aghalurcher preserves a pre-Norman monastic tradition, a fifteenth-century Maguire remodelling and a dispersed sculptural record, making it a key b…
- Near Enniskillen
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aghanaglack
County Fermanagh
Aghanaglack concentrates thousands of years of archaeology in one Boho townland: a late Stone Age burial monument, medieval cross, underground cave…
- Near Enniskillen
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Sacred place · Medieval
Agivey Abbey
County Londonderry
Agivey Abbey preserves the record of an early monastic site that became a medieval grange before its lands passed to London’s Ironmongers in 1604.
- Near Coleraine
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aldermanshaw Priory
Leicestershire
Rubble cottage stonework in Charnwood Forest is the main clue to a monastery already ruined by the mid-fifteenth century. Aldermanshaw Priory was a…
- Near Woodhouse
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Altar Stone (Stonehenge)
Wiltshire
The Altar Stone lies flat at the centre of Stonehenge, a slab of purplish-green micaceous sandstone measuring 4.9 metres long, 1 metre wide and hal…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Andwell Priory
Hampshire
A rare surviving fragment of an "alien priory": a monastic cell answering to a French mother house: swept away by the political fallout of England'…
- Near Basingstoke
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Annaghdown Abbey
County Galway
Annaghdown Abbey preserves a compact Arroasian foundation beside its cathedral, where surviving church, cloister (the covered walkway round a monas…
- Near Galway
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Arbury Priory
Warwickshire
The stones that once formed Arbury Priory were carried away, cut and dressed a second time, and reassembled as a country house. When Sir Edmund And…
- Near Chilvers Coton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ardtole Church
County Down
Ardtole Church combines a fifteenth-century parish ruin, early-Christian sculpture and a stone souterrain (an underground passage, probably for sto…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Arundel Blackfriars
West Sussex
Structural remains of a Dominican friary: a house of friars who worked among townspeople: still stand in Mill Lane at Arundel, in West Sussex. For…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Arundel Priory
west-sussex
A religious house under a prior, founded in 1102, dissolved in 1380 and replaced on the same site by a college for twenty aged poor men: the buildi…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aslackby Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Until about 1891 a tower, possibly belonging to the preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar) church, stood toget…
- Near Aslackby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Astley Priory
Worcestershire
The only fabric of Astley Priory that survives above ground is the Prior's Well, sitting near the entrance to St Peter's churchyard, and a fragment…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Atherstone Priory
Warwickshire
Before he was crowned, the man who would become Henry VII took communion at an Augustinian religious house in Atherstone on the eve of the Battle o…
- Near Atherstone
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Auchagallon Stone Circle
North Ayrshire
Auchagallon is a fifteen-stone Arran monument whose circle and central cairn, a mound of piled stones covering a burial, preserve evidence of Stone…
- Near Machrie
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Augustinian Friary of the Most Holy Trinity, Dublin
County Dublin
The Augustinian Friary of the Most Holy Trinity was medieval Dublin's Augustinian college, later revealed by excavation beneath Temple Bar.
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Augustinian Friary, York
North Yorkshire
A writ of protection issued by Henry III in July 1272 marks the first firm documentary trace of the Augustinian friars in York. Their house stood i…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Founded about 1290, dissolved about 1540, and the site afterwards held hospitals, prisons, guild houses, a gas company and a barber surgeons' hall.
- Near Newcastle upon Tyne
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Avinagillan standing stone
Argyll and Bute
A solitary standing stone raised somewhere in prehistory, its silent presence over the Kintyre shoreline outlasting any record of who put it there…
- Near Campbeltown
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Axminster Monastery
Devon
A named Anglo-Saxon prince, Cyneheard the Ætheling, was buried here: the one fact anchoring this otherwise undocumented Devon minster (originally a…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aylesford Priory
Kent
Aylesford Priory is a nationally important Carmelite pilgrimage site where a 1242 foundation, Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the mon…
- Near Aylesford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Baddesley Preceptory
hampshire
A house of the Knights Hospitaller that moved after the Black Death and left its surviving buildings behind at the place it moved from.
- Near Basingstoke
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballindoon Friary
County Sligo
A Dominican religious house that endured barely three generations beside Lough Arrow before Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries reached even th…
- Near Sligo
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs
county-kerry
Ballinskelligs brings a medieval Augustinian religious house into the coastal setting shared with the Skellig Islands and their older religious com…
- Near Ballinskelligs
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