Sacred place · Medieval
Pillar of Eliseg
Denbighshire
A ninth-century royal inscription and a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) burial mound occupy the same stone, three thousa…
- Near Denbigh
- Some walking
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 10 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pinley Priory
Warwickshire
A fourteenth-century cottage north-west of the farmhouse was probably where the nuns lodged their visitors. Both it and the farmhouse are listed gr…
- Near Rowington
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pipewell Abbey
Northamptonshire
A single Northamptonshire abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) once ran a scattered farming empire across two counties, its Warwic…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Plympton Priory
Devon
Plympton Priory was one of Devon’s most important Augustinian houses, occupying an Anglo-Saxon religious site and becoming the county’s richest mon…
- Near Plympton
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Pobull Fhinn
Outer Hebrides
At least two dozen stones stand in an oval on the south side of Ben Langass on North Uist, eight of them on the northern arc and sixteen on the sou…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Poisoning of Abbot Greenwell
North Yorkshire
In 1447 a monk of England's richest Cistercian abbey tried to poison his own abbot with a bowl of soup: and the surviving letters to the mother hou…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Polesworth Abbey
Warwickshire
A Benedictine nunnery in north Warwickshire.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Poling Preceptory
West Sussex
A West Sussex house of a military order, dissolved in 1540: its buildings listed Grade I, its history almost unrecorded.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Polsloe Priory
Devon
Polsloe Priory preserves the story of Devon’s first religious house for women, from its twelfth-century Benedictine foundation to a rare surviving…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pontefract Priory
West Yorkshire
A Cluniac house of about 1090, dependent on la Charité-sur-Loire, whose cartulary survives and whose burials include Richard, Duke of York.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Porlock Stone Circle
Somerset
Thirteen stones now, ten in 2009, forty-three when the circle went up in the era before writing arrived in these islands - and some of what stands…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Portumna Abbey
County Galway
A single church at Portumna carried three congregations in succession: Cistercian, Dominican and Church of Ireland: across more than five centuries…
- Near Portumna
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Poughley Priory
Berkshire
A minor Augustinian monastery known through papal bulls, a fire, a flooded mill dispute, and Cardinal Wolsey's asset-stripping of it to found his O…
- Near Chieveley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Poulton Abbey
Cheshire
A Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) that quietly relocated in 1214, leaving behind a chapel site so thoroughly forgotten tha…
- Near Chester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Poulton Priory
Gloucestershire
Founded in 1337 as a private chantry chapel, Poulton became a full Gilbertine priory within thirteen years: then vanished so completely that a Vict…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Priddy Circles
Somerset
Four circular bank-and-ditch enclosures near Priddy in the Mendips, protected by law.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Prinknash Abbey
Gloucestershire
A hunting lodge became a monastery that went on to found two more British abbeys, and whose pottery: fired from clay dug from its own foundations:…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory Church of St Peter, Thurgarton
Nottinghamshire
Thurgarton’s surviving tower and aisle make the scale of a wealthy Augustinian house tangible, even after an eighteenth-century owner demolished th…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory Cottages, Steventon
Oxfordshire
A monastic grange that never grew into the priory: a smaller monastery led by a prior: its name suggests, later saved from obscurity by five women…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St Mary in the Meadow, Beeston Regis
Norfolk
Beeston Priory is a substantial Augustinian ruin whose independent canons combined parish work, schooling and agricultural enterprise until the 153…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St Thomas of Canterbury
West Midlands
Its vanished graveyard kept resurfacing under Birmingham's streets for two centuries, fuelling a debate over whether this, not St Martin's, was the…
- Near Birmingham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St. Thomas near Stafford
Staffordshire
The richest Augustinian priory in England, whose monks were caught hunting with the laity in 1347: and were caught again in 1518 and 1524.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Prittlewell Priory
Essex
Prittlewell Priory is a rare surviving Cluniac house in Essex, whose medieval doorway and later museum preserve a monastic site transformed into So…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pulloxhill Grange
Bedfordshire
Its scant surviving records trace a working monastic economy: rents, land and jurisdiction shared between Woburn Abbey and Dunstable Priory: cut sh…
- Near Pulloxhill
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Q and R Holes
Wiltshire
The earliest known stone structure at Stonehenge, predating the visible Sarsen Circle by centuries and giving the first clear evidence of the monum…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quakers Friars
Bristol
A single Bristol plot carries two founding stories at once: a medieval Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather tha…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quarr Abbey (Cistercian)
Isle of Wight
Quarr Abbey combines the remains of a powerful medieval Cistercian house with a bold 20th-century Benedictine monastery, making its landscape a rar…
- Near Ryde
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quenington Preceptory
Gloucestershire
A minor Gloucestershire manor became, within decades of its 1193 founding, a Hospitaller estate that absorbed a fellow preceptory (a local estate o…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quin Abbey
County Clare
A friary: a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them: built inside the wall of the Norman castle that replac…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ramsey Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A fen-island hermitage founded on the strength of a bull's wanderings grew into the third-ranked abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot…
- Near Ramsey
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ranton Abbey
Staffordshire
An Augustinian priory whose tower still stands beside the burnt-out shell of a hunting lodge: two ruins from two different centuries on one site.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rathfran Friary
County Mayo
A Dominican priory once known as "Brandubh's Fort of the Sweet Bells": and the scene of a 1513 murder that shattered the sanctuary its walls were m…
- Near Ballina
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstone Priory
Buckinghamshire
Its 1524 suppression by Thomas Wolsey helped bankroll a new Oxford college: this small Buckinghamshire priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather…
- Near Ravenstone
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstonedale Priory
Cumbria
A Gilbertine cell meant for only a master and three canons, whose surviving vault once served the manorial court as a prison for those facing capit…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ravenswood standing stone
City of Edinburgh
The Ravenswood standing stone is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC) monument whose repeated moves and survival within an Edinburgh housing estate m…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Abbey
Berkshire
Once one of the largest royal monasteries in Europe and the burial place of a king, reduced by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monaste…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reigate Priory
Surrey
An Augustinian priory turned Tudor mansion turned secondary school: its 13th-century cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central cour…
- Near Reigate
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Rempstone Stone Circle
Dorset
Rempstone Stone Circle is Dorset’s only sandstone circle, a damaged and overgrown Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) monume…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Abbey
Derbyshire
A stone crypt built over a spring still stands beneath a parish church, holding the remains of Mercian kings and later giving up a mass grave of Vi…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Priory
Derbyshire
Gilbert Thacker’s 1550s demolition left Repton Priory almost flat within a day, ending a four-century Augustinian house beside the River Trent.
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Revesby Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Cistercian house founded by an earl who ended his life as one of its monks later passed to the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and its Victorian succe…
- Near Revesby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rewley Abbey
Oxfordshire
Oxford's Cistercian house of study, built so monks could attend university lectures: a monastic experiment in higher education now reduced to a sin…
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Sacred place · Roman
Rey Cross
County Durham
Rey Cross is a protected Stainmore landmark whose uncertain purpose: legendary Viking grave or boundary marker: was tested but not resolved by mode…
- Near Bishop Auckland
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rievaulx Abbey
North Yorkshire
Rievaulx Abbey shows how Cistercian prayer, engineered water, and European wool and iron trade remade a remote Yorkshire valley into a monastic pow…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rincrew Abbey
County Waterford
A ruined house of two crusading military orders in succession: Templar, then Hospitaller: standing on private land where no visitor can walk its st…
- Near Waterford
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ripley Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Ripley Market Cross preserves the steps of a fifteenth-century market marker, later transformed by a sundial after the market itself faded.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Robertsbridge Abbey
East Sussex
Robertsbridge Abbey preserves the small-scale history of a Cistercian house shaped by difficult coastal land, dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of…
- Near Hastings
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Robin Hood's Stone
Merseyside
Robin Hood’s Stone is a scheduled Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC) standing stone in Liverpool, preserving cup-marked prehistoric (before written r…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rocester Abbey
Staffordshire
Nine monks including their head at the surrender. The buildings were dismantled for reusable material and the land sold to a Shropshire MP.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Roche Abbey
South Yorkshire
A 1546 grant listing lead and glass still lying on site shows the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot)'s stripping after the Dissolution (…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Rollright Stones
Warwickshire
Three monuments of local oolitic limestone on the Oxfordshire border, known as the King's Men, the Whispering Knights and the King Stone.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Romsey Abbey
Hampshire
A Norman nunnery church that survived the Dissolution because the town bought it outright in 1544 for £100: now the largest parish church in Hampsh…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Roscommon Abbey
County Roscommon
Its founder's tomb effigy, carved around 1290–1300, is one of only two royal effigies known to survive from medieval Ireland.
- Near Roscommon
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Sacred place · Medieval
Roscrea Friary
County Tipperary
A crenellated bell tower on pointed arches and carved corbels is the last standing witness to a friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeo…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ross Errilly Friary
County Galway
A working monastery reoccupied and expelled seven times over three centuries, its cloisters, kitchen and dormitories still standing more complete t…
- Near Headford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rosserk Friary
County Mayo
A carved Round Tower on its double piscina, a pair of basins near an altar for rinsing communion vessels, is a rare stone echo of Ireland's older m…
- Near Ballina
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rosslyn Chapel
Midlothian
Rosslyn Chapel is a superbly carved fifteenth-century collegiate church (a church staffed by a college of priests, without being a monastery) whose…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rothley Temple
Leicestershire
One small chapel held the Knights Templar, then the Knights Hospitaller, then an abolitionist campaign hatched with Wilberforce, and the birth of a…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Royston Cave
Hertfordshire
A bell-shaped chamber cut into solid chalk is covered floor to ceiling in medieval carvings found nowhere else in Britain, yet nobody has ever prov…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Rudston Monolith
East Riding of Yorkshire
At over 25 feet, it is the tallest standing stone in Britain: and the Norman parish church beside it was built on already-sacred ground, not by coi…
- Near Beverley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rufford Abbey
Nottinghamshire
Rufford’s parkland ruins trace how a Cistercian estate displaced villages, became a Tudor country house and remains publicly accessible today.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Runston Chapel
Monmouthshire
The lone survivor of a vanished village: a Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) chapel still standing above some twenty-five…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ruther Cross
North Yorkshire
Ruther Cross preserves a small but protected trace of historic movement at the former meeting of Ruthergate and Hutton Lane in Guisborough.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ruxox Cell
Bedfordshire
A buried wall on the riverbank was built partly from a reused Roman column base: the clearest physical trace left of a monastic cell otherwise know…
- Near Flitwick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rye Austin Friary
East Sussex
Rye's only visible trace of a community of Augustinian friars is a single chapel that has since done duty as a barracks, a hall and a pottery studio.
- Near Hastings
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Sacred place · Medieval
Saint Macdara's Island
County Galway
A patron saint of seafarers whose shrine, still reached only by open boat, has drawn a pilgrimage every 16 July for generations - a crossing so exp…
- Near Carna
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Friary
Wiltshire
A royal-backed Dominican house that vanished so completely that only chance building work in 1978 proved where its dead once lay.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Grey Friary
Wiltshire
A Franciscan house built with timber from Henry III himself, erased so completely by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in th…
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Sandbach Crosses
Cheshire
Sandbach’s paired ninth-century Anglo-Saxon crosses are an extraordinary public survival: carved with biblical scenes and interlace, dispersed afte…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sandleford Priory (monastery)
Berkshire
One of its priors, William Westbury, went on to save Eton College from being folded into St George's Chapel, Windsor: an unlikely brush with histor…
- Near Newbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sandwell Priory
West Midlands
Suppressed in 1525 at Cardinal Wolsey's request to help fund his new Oxford college, more than a decade before Henry VIII's own dissolution: his cl…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sawley Abbey
Lancashire
One of only three surviving books from its library became the Sawley Map, the earliest English world map in the same tradition as the Hereford Mapp…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sawtry Abbey
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire's only Cistercian house, and the last resting place of a Scottish earl whose family tied the abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot,…
- Near Sawtry
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Scone Palace / Scone Abbey
Perth and Kinross
The crowning place of forty-two Kings of Scots and the site of Scotland's first parliament: now a Gothic Revival house with nothing left standing o…
- Near Perth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Seaton Priory
Cumbria
A nunnery so poor it depended on grants from an archbishop, a duke and a neighbouring abbey just to survive: yet its ruined chancel (the eastern en…
- Near Workington
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Sacred place · Medieval
Selborne Priory
Hampshire
Nothing of its buildings shows above ground today, yet twentieth-century digging recovered one of the most complete documentary archives of any Eng…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Selby Abbey
North Yorkshire
A fifteenth-century window in the quire carries the heraldic arms of George Washington's ancestors: reputedly among the oldest depictions of the Am…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sele Priory
West Sussex
A Benedictine priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: dependent on Saumur, cut loose from France in 1396 for an annual pay…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Selsey Abbey
West Sussex
Founded by St Wilfrid in 681 on land from the king of the last mainland English kingdom to be converted, and marked by the freeing of 250 slaves.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Selskar Abbey
County Wexford
Ireland's first Anglo-Irish peace treaty was signed on this ground in 1169: decades before the stone priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usua…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sempringham Priory
Lincolnshire
The mother house of the only religious order ever founded by an Englishman, governing dozens of double communities of monks and nuns until its ston…
- Some walking
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Povington Priory
Dorset
Povington Priory records the economic reach of Normandy’s Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) of Bec into Dorset, where wool and…
- Near Tyneham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Preston Greyfriars
Lancashire
Preston Greyfriars records an early Franciscan presence in Lancashire, documented by 1260 and associated with members of the Holland family.
- Near Preston
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of Douglas
Isle of Man
The Priory of Douglas was a Cistercian nunnery whose prioress held the secular title Baroness of Douglas, combining monastic leadership with extens…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of the Holy Trinity, Ipswich
Suffolk
The townspeople used it as their parish church until 1300, when the canons built St Margaret's next door to get them out.
- Near Ipswich
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
RAF Bentley Priory
Greater London
RAF Bentley Priory was the command centre of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, where Dowding’s air-defence system coordinated the prote…
- Near Stanmore
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Nunnery
Berkshire
A Berkshire nunnery founded in 979, in the last century of Anglo-Saxon rule, whose only surviving trace is the parish church built on its former gr…
- Near Reading
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Sacred place · Medieval
Red Abbey, Cork
County Cork
Red Abbey’s stone tower is one of the few standing fragments of medieval Cork, surviving the Augustinian precinct’s destruction and later serving a…
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reenconnell
County Kerry
On a hill rising 274 metres above the north-western Dingle Peninsula, some 5.7 kilometres north-north-west of Dingle town, stand the weathered rema…
- Near Dingle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rialton Grange
Cornwall
Rialton Grange records the former agricultural estate of the priors of Bodmin in St Columb Minor, a small surviving clue to medieval monastic landh…
- Near St Columb Minor
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ringmoor stone row and cairn circle
Devon
Ringmoor combines one of Devon’s long prehistoric (before written records reached Britain) stone rows with a cairn (a mound of piled stones, often…
- Near Shaugh Prior
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ruislip Priory
Greater London
Ruislip Priory records the administrative reach of Normandy’s Bec Abbey into England: an alien-priory manor centre that later passed to the institu…
- Near Ruislip
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rumburgh Priory
Suffolk
The monks here kept a particular devotion to St Bee, a Cumbrian saint, whom they commemorated at Michaelmas. Wolsey suppressed the house in 1528 to…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rushen Abbey
Isle of Man
Rushen Abbey was the Isle of Man’s Cistercian centre of literacy and monastic life, where the Chronicle of Mann was compiled; its restored Ballasal…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Saddlescombe Preceptory
West Sussex
A Knights Templar estate of about 1228, run to fund the order's work in the east rather than as a monastery.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Saul Monastery
County Down
Saul Monastery brings Saint Patrick tradition, Viking and medieval disruption, and a surviving Augustinian abbey (a self-governing monastery, its h…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sclerder Abbey
Cornwall
Sclerder Abbey is a Grade II listed nineteenth-century former Carmelite monastery whose successive religious communities and current ecumenical lif…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Scorhill
Devon
Scorhill is one of Devon’s largest and best-preserved Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) stone circles, where damaged but u…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Seahenge
Norfolk
Seahenge is a uniquely preserved early Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) timber circle, built in 2049 BC, whose ritua…
- Near Holme-next-the-Sea
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sean Ross Abbey
County Tipperary
A Georgian country house whose grounds hold a ruined medieval abbey, an unmarked burial ground for over a thousand children, and the real story beh…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
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