Sacred place · Medieval
Seton Collegiate Church
East Lothian
Seton Collegiate Church is an unusually legible unfinished late-medieval church, preserving its choir, transepts and tower alongside the absent nav…
- Near Dunbar
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 11 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shaftesbury Abbey
Dorset
Shaftesbury Abbey was one of medieval England’s richest nunneries, shaped by royal foundation and the cult of St Edward the Martyr before its 1539…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shalford Preceptory
Berkshire
A Knights Hospitaller estate reduced to a single building: its medieval chapel, which quietly served as a farm barn for centuries before its histor…
- Near Brimpton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shap Abbey
Cumbria
One of its own abbots rose to become Bishop of Ely, and his memory still links this remote Cumbrian ruin to the great cathedral where his monument…
- Near Shap
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Shap Stone Avenue
Cumbria
Antiquarians once ranked this Cumbrian avenue with Avebury as one of Europe's largest stone monuments: now a scatter of boulders and a circle half-…
- Near Shap
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sheen Priory
Greater London
Sheen Priory was Henry V’s ambitious Carthusian foundation beside his rebuilt royal palace, a lost monastery whose foundations survive beneath Rich…
- Near Richmond
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Sheldon stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Long classified as a recumbent stone circle despite no recumbent stone ever being found here, Sheldon has recently had that identity questioned by…
- Near Oldmeldrum
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shelford Priory
Nottinghamshire
Shelford brings contested patronage, royal visits and a later transformation into a fortified manor to one site that began as a small Augustinian c…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sherborne Abbey
Dorset
Sherborne Abbey is a thousand-year religious landmark that evolved from Saxon cathedral to Benedictine abbey and parish church, preserving exceptio…
- Near Sherborne
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shingay Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A water-filled moat in open Cambridgeshire farmland is almost all that survives of a Hospitaller estate nearly nine centuries old, its buildings go…
- Near Shingay
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Sacred place
Shoreham Memorial Cross
Kent
Shoreham Memorial Cross is a near-unique chalk hillside war memorial created by a bereaved local father and village community in 1920, transforming…
- Near Shoreham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Abbey
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Abbey turned a Norman foundation into a major pilgrimage centre around St Winifred, then survived dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of t…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shrule Abbey
County Mayo
A grassy mound carries thirteen centuries of memory: a saint's disciple, two changes of overlord, a 1306 tax record: with almost nothing built left…
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shulbrede Priory
West Sussex
A medieval monastic house that became the home of the Ponsonby family, and is listed Grade I.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sibton Abbey
Suffolk
A monastery under an abbot of the early Cistercian order, founded about 1150 by William de Chesney, High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.
- Near Sibton
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Silverstream Priory
county-meath
A house built for the Gormanston family in 1843, passed through two religious orders, and in 2017 made the first new monastery in County Meath sinc…
- Near Drogheda
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sleaty Church
County Laois
A seventh-century bishop here wrote one of the earliest surviving lives of Saint Patrick, at a site that also once served as a residence of the Kin…
- Near Portlaoise
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sligo Abbey
County Sligo
A 15th-century tower hangs suspended over the nave on two arches alone: bolder than any of its sister Munster friaries, and now unreachable even by…
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Snelshall Priory
Buckinghamshire
A monastery that never found its feet: refounded twice, dogged by poverty, and quietly dismantled so its stones could build the parish church next…
- Near Tattenhoe
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Sacred place · Medieval
Soham Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A Cambridgeshire parish church stands on the foundations of the county's first Roman Christian site, whose founder's bones travelled through three…
- Near Soham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sopwell Priory
Hertfordshire
A community of Benedictine women vanished into a Tudor courtyard: the same walls sheltered a medieval prioress and, four centuries later, a command…
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
Southwark Cathedral
Greater London
The first Gothic church in London, nearly demolished for a railway in 1852: and with a nave, the long western body of the church, that has been reb…
- Near Southwark
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Sacred place · Medieval
Southwick Priory
Hampshire
A pilgrimage shrine famous enough to draw Henry VIII in person in 1510, its original church still stands in daily use inside the Roman walls of Por…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Spinney Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A murdered prior, a Cromwell in retirement and a working farm making award-winning cider all sit on the same low fen-edge site where an Augustinian…
- Near Wicken
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Albans Cathedral
Hertfordshire
Its crossing tower, raised from reclaimed Roman brick around 1080, is the only 11th-century great tower still standing in England.
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Aldhelm's Well
Somerset
An ancient spring at Doulting that is the source of the River Sheppey, listed Grade II.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's and Blackfriars' Hall, Norwich
Norfolk
St Andrew’s and Blackfriars’ Hall form England’s most complete surviving mendicant complex from before the sixteenth-century closure of the monaste…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Church, Dacre
Cumbria
A monastery recorded here in the 8th and 10th centuries left two carved cross-shaft fragments inside the Norman church that replaced it, one bearin…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Andrew's Church, Penrith
Cumbria
Two Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft monuments in the churchyard, the Giant's Grave and the Giant's Thumb, predate the present Georgian church by eight cent…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Priory, Northampton
Northamptonshire
A Cluniac priory, a monastery run by a prior, where the philosopher Duns Scotus was ordained a priest in 1291, and whose stone was later reused to…
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Sacred place · Roman
St Ann's Well (Buxton)
Derbyshire
A warm spring the Romans venerated with 232 votive coins still flows at a steady 27°C beneath the Georgian spa town built around it.
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Anthony's Chapel and Hermitage
City of Edinburgh
The chapel above St Margaret's Loch is one of Edinburgh's least explained medieval buildings: no foundation record survives, and the earliest firm…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Augustine's Abbey
Kent
St Augustine’s Abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) was a foundational English Benedictine monastery, created beside Canterbury’s fi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew-the-Great
City of London
Founded on the strength of a single fevered dream, its Norman crossing and choir survived the Dissolution, the Great Fire and the Blitz to become L…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
St Bartholomew's Church, Barrow
Cheshire
A Cheshire parish church rooted in a Knights Hospitaller preceptory, where medieval stonework, Georgian additions and Victorian restoration meet in…
- Near Great Barrow
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew's Church, Penn
West Midlands
A round Anglo-Saxon churchyard and a broken preaching cross tied to Lady Godiva's husband sit beside a Victorian rebuild by the Lancaster firm of P…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bees Priory
Cumbria
A 14th-century knight's body, found in 1981 with skin and nails still intact after six centuries, lies within a priory, a monastery headed by a pri…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Benet's Abbey
Norfolk
St Benet’s Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) is an exceptional Broads monastery: a Benedictine house spared at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's c…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Beuno's Church, Clynnog Fawr
Gwynedd
St Beuno’s Church is a Grade I medieval pilgrimage church at the site of a 7th-century clas, notable for its late-medieval fabric, chapel and nearb…
- Near Clynnog Fawr
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Botolph's Priory
Essex
St Botolph’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: was England’s first Augustinian house and a leading convent until 1536; its Norman ruins preser…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Catherine's Chapel, Lydiate
Merseyside
St Catherine’s Chapel is a rare late-medieval private chapel, locally called Lydiate Abbey despite never being an abbey, with fabric and burials th…
- Near Lydiate
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
St Catherine's Hill, Hampshire
Hampshire
A single chalk hilltop carries an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort, a lost medieval chapel, a 17th-century turf maze, an…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Chad's Church, Wybunbury
Cheshire
The surviving leaning tower of a repeatedly rebuilt Cheshire church, whose nineteenth-century rescue technique later informed work on the Leaning T…
- Near Wybunbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Christopher's Church, Pott Shrigley
Cheshire
Its churchyard preaching cross is a scheduled monument (a site protected by law for its archaeological importance) in its own right, and one of its…
- Near Pott Shrigley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Columba's Chapel, Southend
Argyll and Bute
A ruined medieval chapel on the Kintyre coast whose carved grave slabs are the strongest surviving evidence of the community that once worshipped h…
- Near Southend
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Cuthbert's Well
Northumberland
Cuddy’s Well preserves a spring tied to Cuthbert’s cult and twelfth-century miracle stories, still channelled through a Georgian conduit for baptis…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Denys Priory
Hampshire
A royal foundation of Henry I whose pilgrimage chapel once drew Henry VIII in person now survives as a garden wall and re-sited archway in a Southa…
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Edith's Church, Shocklach
Cheshire
The carved south entrance is the church's defining survival: three Norman orders, chevron and cable moulding, and weathered corbel heads (carved st…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Edward the Confessor's Church, Leek
Staffordshire
A church whose churchyard shows a double sunset at midsummer: an alignment calculated to predate Christianity in Britain.
- Near Leek
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Fillan's Cave and Well, Pittenweem
Fife
St Fillan’s Cave is the sacred core of Pittenweem’s ‘place of the caves’ identity, linking an early Christian site, an Augustinian monastery and th…
- Near St Andrews
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Frideswide's Priory
Oxfordshire
A 7th-century royal nunnery, sacked in the St Brice's Day massacre and rebuilt three times over, still stands today as Oxford's cathedral and an Ox…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Giles' Cathedral
City of Edinburgh
Its 1637 prayer-book riot lit the fuse for the National Covenant and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, earning St Giles' the title 'the Mother Church…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Govan's Chapel
Pembrokeshire
A chapel of twenty feet by twelve built into the side of a limestone cliff at St Govan's Head.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Gwenfaen's Well
Isle of Anglesey
A rare three-chambered drystone well house survives almost intact, still visited for a legend of curing mental illness with an offering of white qu…
- Near Bangor
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Helen's Church, Bishopsgate
City of London
A double church built for nuns and parishioners side by side, it now holds more monuments than anywhere in London bar Westminster Abbey, and has co…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Illtyd's Church, Llantwit Major
Vale of Glamorgan
A church complex on the site of what has been called the oldest college in the United Kingdom.
- Near Llantwit Major
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Chapel, Lindsey
Suffolk
Dissolved in 1545 and granted to Thomas Turner, who turned it into a barn. That is the reason a thirteenth-century chapel is still standing.
- Near Lindsey
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Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Church, Stirchley
Shropshire
A twelfth-century church encased in brick, extended for ironworkers in 1838, and holding a Norman chancel arch: at the eastern end, by the altar: t…
- Near Stirchley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Priory, Bristol
Bristol
For seven centuries its churchyard hosted Bristol's greatest fair: bear-baiting, Punch and Judy, and possibly Shakespeare's own company on the bill.
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St John the Baptist's Church, Chester
Cheshire
In 973 six tributary kings are said to have rowed King Edgar up the Dee to hold court here: a church that was Chester's cathedral before it was eve…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St John the Baptist's Church, Stanwick
North Yorkshire
A medieval parish church stands inside the ramparts of an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) oppidum, its churchyard holding a 9th-…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Abbey, Colchester
Essex
St John’s Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) was a major Benedictine institution built from Roman Colchester’s fabric, whose gatehouse and redi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Jerusalem
Kent
Its county historian owner spent so lavishly on the house that he went bankrupt and served five years in prison, a very personal footnote to a site…
- Near Dartford
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Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Priory, Kilkenny
County Kilkenny
Weathered tombs sit beside a working chapel where Kilkenny's Michael Street meets John Street, marking the former religious house's layered fabric.
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Kenneth's Chapel
Argyll and Bute
Eight medieval cross slabs and a sixteenth-century high cross survive inside its walls, set within an island cemetery still used for burials today.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Kentigern's Church, Aspatria
Cumbria
Behind its Victorian rebuild the church keeps a working holy well, a genuine Anglo-Saxon hogback tomb, and pre-Norman crosses carved with a fifth-c…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Kentigern's Church, Caldbeck
Cumbria
A working parish church built over a 6th-century predecessor, still paired with the holy well where the earliest Christians of Caldbeck were baptised.
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Lawrence's Church, Over Peover
Cheshire
Its surviving medieval and seventeenth-century family chapels contain Mainwaring monuments, while a plaque and flag record General Patton's staff w…
- Near Over Peover
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Leonard's Priory, Stamford
Lincolnshire
St Leonard’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: preserves a rare Grade I church front and arcade in the heavy round-arched style of the elevent…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Machar's Cathedral
Aberdeen City
A working Church of Scotland kirk that still keeps William Wallace's quartered remains in its walls and a ceiling of 48 royal and episcopal coats o…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall
Orkney Islands
The oldest cathedral in Scotland, now a Church of Scotland parish church in Kirkwall.
- Near Kirkwall
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Margaret's Convent, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
A Benedictine house so poor it needed royal land grants to survive, it left behind only a lane name, a farm name and a district still called St Mar…
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Martin's Chapel, Chisbury
Wiltshire
For three centuries the tithes from this small chapel supported a priory, a monastery headed by a prior, forty miles away in Southampton, even afte…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Martin's Church, Cwmyoy
Monmouthshire
A medieval parish church so distorted by ground movement that its tower, nave (the main western space where the congregation stood) and chancel (th…
- Near Abergavenny
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary Abbots
Greater London
St Mary Abbots brings a medieval Abingdon Abbey foundation into the centre of modern Kensington, crowned by London’s tallest church spire and layer…
- Near Kensington
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary and St Martin's Church, Blyth
Nottinghamshire
Blyth preserves rare Norman fabric from a French-connected Benedictine priory whose church remained in parish use after its 1536 closure.
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Mary le Port Church, Bristol
Bristol
A single medieval tower stands alone in a modern park, the only fragment left after a night of bombing reduced the rest of the church to rubble.
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary Magdalene Priory, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
A tiny Benedictine outpost of York's St Mary's Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) ended up guarding a sacred spring and a stretc…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
St Mary the Virgin Church, Caerau, Cardiff
Cardiff
A medieval church built directly on the ramparts of an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) hillfort (an upland enclosur…
- Near Caerau
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary the Virgin, Ivinghoe
Buckinghamshire
Rebuilt after rebels burned the church and town in 1234, it kept its rose windows and grew a tie-beam roof carved with angels and apostles.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey ruins, Bardsey Island
Gwynedd
A single ruined tower on a remote Welsh island once drew a king and, by tradition, held the graves of some 20,000 saints.
- Near Bangor
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey, Kenilworth
Warwickshire
The abbot's pension at the surrender was £100; his prior got £8. Most of the ruins were deliberately reburied in 1967 to protect them.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey, York
North Yorkshire
One of its own monks wrote the fullest surviving eyewitness account of a medieval parliament and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, later folded into a chr…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Acton
Cheshire
Its tower, raised around 1180, is the oldest in Cheshire, and its south aisle holds carved Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Goth…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Astbury
Cheshire
Astbury's church is unusually broad at the west end, with a detached tower and a south porch whose upper room may have served as a priest's treasury.
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Bruera
Cheshire
St Mary's Church, Bruera preserves Norman fabric within a much-altered rural church, alongside a scheduled churchyard sundial made from the remains…
- Near Bruera
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Derwen
Denbighshire
A carved timber rood screen, the carved screen dividing the main body of a church from the space around the altar, has kept its loft intact, one of…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sewardsley Priory
Northamptonshire
Sewardsley Priory links a twelfth-century Cistercian nunnery to the 2006 archaeological rediscovery that restored its lost location and plan to pub…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shobdon Priory
Herefordshire
A 12th-century church at a Herefordshire priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: whose entire fabric was pulled down in the 17…
- Near Shobdon
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shouldham Priory
Norfolk
Shouldham Priory was a rare Gilbertine double house for canons and nuns, founded around 1190 and now preserved as buried remains, earthworks and fi…
- Near Shouldham
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Shovel Down
Devon
Shovel Down is a concentrated Dartmoor prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) landscape, combining probable Bronze Age (roughly 2500…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sidmouth Priory
Devon
Sidmouth Priory’s surviving chapel fabric and changing monastic affiliations trace a small coastal religious site from Norman patronage through dis…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Skendleby Priory
Lincolnshire
Skendleby Priory preserves the archaeology of a small Bardney Abbey cell, where 2005 excavation brought the believed St James Chapel remains into v…
- Near Skendleby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Slevesholm Priory
Norfolk
Slevesholm Priory was a Cluniac cell of Castle Acre at Methwold, a completely lost monastic site whose absence above ground records the long impact…
- Near Methwold
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Sacred place · Medieval
Snape Priory
Suffolk
Wolsey obtained a papal bull to suppress it in 1527–28. After his fall the site went to the Duke of Norfolk instead.
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Sacred place · Medieval
South Abbey, Youghal
County Cork
South Abbey was one of Ireland’s earliest Franciscan foundations; although its medieval fabric has gone, its site preserves a continuous local reli…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Adamnan's Church, Lonan
Isle of Man
St Adamnan’s Church at Lonan preserves a remote Manx Christian site with 5th-century Celtic crosses, a likely early keeill and surviving medieval p…
- Near Baldrine
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
St Breock Downs Monolith
Cornwall
St Breock Downs Monolith is Cornwall's largest prehistoric menhir: a standing stone from before any written account of Britain existed: a re-erecte…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Dominic's Holy Well
Cornwall
The name St Dominic’s Well in Truro masks an important location puzzle: the visible spring is likely not the historic friary (a community of friars…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St George's Priory, Thetford
Norfolk
St George’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, reveals a rare institutional reversal: a poor Benedictine house became a nunnery under Bury St Edmu…
- Near Thetford
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