Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Pateley Bridge
North Yorkshire
St Mary’s Church preserves a roofless parish ruin on Pateley Bridge’s older high-ground settlement site, beside the town’s later shift of worship c…
- Some walking
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 12 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Reculver
Kent
Demolished by gunpowder in 1809 on the casting vote of its own vicar, its twin towers survived only because Trinity House recognised their value as…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Temple Balsall
West Midlands
A parish church traditionally reckoned the mother church of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller in England, its altar window still picturing knight…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's College, Oxford
Oxfordshire
A college founded in 1435 by Thomas Holden and his wife Elizabeth for the Augustinian order.
- Near Oxford
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Priory and Cathedral
West Midlands
The only English cathedral pulled down at the Reformation: the break with Rome that shut the religious houses in the 1530s: its buried west front a…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Llanfihangel Ysgeifiog
Isle of Anglesey
Old St Michael’s is a rare unrestored late-medieval Anglesey church ruin, retaining chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) and…
- Near Gaerwen
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Michael's Church, Muncaster
Cumbria
A scheduled Anglo-Saxon high cross stands in the churchyard beside a Grade I church whose windows carry a rare medieval Doom scene and Victorian gl…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Trelawnyd
Flintshire
A scheduled 14th-century preaching cross, carved with the Crucifixion, still stands in a churchyard rebuilt almost entirely within one decade of Vi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Whittington
Lancashire
A Victorian church tower rises from the earthworks of a vanished Norman castle, its sundial still standing on the summit of the original great eart…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Moluag's Cathedral, Lismore
Argyll and Bute
The parish church swallowed a medieval cathedral whole in 1749, still wearing its doorways, piscina: the basin near an altar for rinsing communion…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mullin's Monastic Site
County Carlow
St Mullin’s is an early medieval monastery: roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans: at a river confluence associated with Saint Mo…
- Near St Mullins
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mungo's Church, Bromfield
Cumbria
A sandstone wellhead raised in 1878 still covers a spring beside a Norman-era church: two separately listed structures sharing one saint's name and…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Myllin's Well
Powys
A holy well where the saint is said to have been the first in Britain to baptise by full immersion: and where wishes were tied to rags rotting on t…
- Near Llanfyllin
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Neots Priory
Cambridgeshire
A Cornish saint's bones, carried east to draw pilgrims, gave this Cambridgeshire town its name and its priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather…
- Near St Neots
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Nicholas Chapel, Chester
Cheshire
St Nicholas's Chapel survives as a rare record of changing urban use: medieval worship gave way to trade, theatre, concerts, cinema and a present-d…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Nicholas' Priory, Exeter
Devon
St Nicholas’ Priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: preserves rare domestic ranges of a Benedictine monastery in Exeter, late…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Olave's Priory
Norfolk
St Olave’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, is a surviving Augustinian Black Canons site on the Waveney, linking a medieval ferry, annual fair a…
- Near St Olaves
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Church, Dean
Cumbria
A working parish church that has grown by addition for eight centuries: Norman nave (the main body of a church, where the congregation gathers), me…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Church, Ravenstonedale
Cumbria
A Georgian church built almost entirely of box pews arranged like a college chapel, standing over the ruined covered walkway of a vanished Gilberti…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Oswald's Church, Winwick
Cheshire
St Oswald's Church, Winwick is a Grade I listed church whose medieval fabric, Anglo-Saxon cross fragment and later rebuilding preserve almost a mil…
- Near Winwick
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Priory, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
One of only two English minsters known to be an exact copy of the Old Minster at Winchester, and the burial place of the Mercian rulers who founded…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Osyth's Priory
Essex
St Osyth’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: is one of Essex’s most substantial monastic estates, where Augustinian fabric, Tudor rebuilding a…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Padarn's Church, Llanbadarn Fawr
Ceredigion
Mid-Wales's largest medieval church, rooted in an early Christian learning centre whose history moves between tradition, monastic power and parish…
- Near Llanbadarn Fawr
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Patrick's Chapel, Heysham
Lancashire
The rock-cut tombs beside the ruin later reached a far wider audience than archaeology ever could, appearing on the cover of a Black Sabbath album,…
- Near Heysham
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Patrick's Island
County Dublin
In 1148 the island hosted a synod of fifteen bishops and over two hundred priests convened to reform the Irish church, one of the larger such gathe…
- Near Skerries
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Peter's Church, Dixton
Monmouthshire
St Peter’s, Dixton, preserves a church site recorded by about 735, medieval fabric and a flood-prone Wye setting, while remaining a Church of Engla…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Peter's Church, Heysham
Lancashire
A blocked Anglo-Saxon doorway, an early Norman chancel arch and a carved Viking hogback stone sit inside one working parish church: three distinct…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Roman
St Peter's Church, Wickham Bishops
Essex
St Peter’s is an eleventh-century redundant church rescued from demolition, where layered materials, medieval wall patterns and contemporary staine…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Queran's Well
Dumfries and Galloway
St Queran’s Well preserves a continuing Scottish holy-well tradition, where coins, pins and ribbons have been offered from at least the nineteenth…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Radegund's Priory, Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
A 12th-century nunnery whose chapel, cloister and hall survive intact inside Jesus College: one of the few places in Cambridge where the medieval r…
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Saeran's Church, Llanynys
Denbighshire
Its 15th-century St Christopher mural, hidden under plaster until 1967, is reckoned the finest surviving medieval wall painting in north Wales.
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Theobald's Church, Great Hautbois
Norfolk
St Theobald’s is a Grade II* round-tower church whose medieval shrine attracted pilgrims, shaping later side arms, aisles and hospital provision at…
- Near Great Hautbois
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Winefride's Well
Flintshire
One of Britain's very few sacred sites to keep an unbroken pilgrimage tradition straight through the Reformation (the break with Rome that shut the…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Winifred's Well, Woolston
Shropshire
A holy well and wellhouse in the hamlet of Woolston, listed Grade II*.
- Near Woolston
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Dominic's Abbey
County Tipperary
A Dominican community that hosted the order's national chapter meetings three times over half a century, and clung on quietly for three hundred yea…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. John's Priory, Trim
County Meath
Granted after the Battle of the Boyne to one of King William's men, who by one account lasted a single night there before riding away at dawn.
- Near Trim
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin
County Dublin
St Mary's Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) was a powerful medieval Dublin monastery whose buried chapter house preserves a trace of its lost…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Duleek
County Meath
The bell tower's north wall still carries the printed outline of the round tower it replaced: early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Roma…
- Near Duleek
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Trim
County Meath
St Mary’s monastery became a pilgrimage centre around a Marian statue before its public burning in 1538, joining sacred survival, suppression and c…
- Near Trim
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Plegmund's well
Cheshire
St Plegmund's Well is a scheduled Cheshire holy well whose documentary history, stone-lined structure and continuing well-dressing tradition preser…
- Near Mickle Trafford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Radegund's Abbey
Kent
St Radegund’s Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) traces a Premonstratensian foundation from Prémontré through its service near D…
- Near Dover
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stanbrook Abbey
North Yorkshire
A community of English nuns founded in exile in 1625 survived imprisonment during the French Revolution, two centuries in Worcestershire and a 2009…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Standon Preceptory
Hertfordshire
A rare English commandery that housed sisters of a crusading order alongside knights, with a fifteenth-century barn still standing on the site.
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stanley Abbey
Wiltshire
A royal-favoured Cistercian house that hosted two kings and a princess, reduced by the dissolution to an empty field: its only visible trace now a…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stanlow Abbey
Cheshire
Stanlow Abbey preserves the scant remains of a Cistercian house repeatedly damaged by its exposed Mersey setting, whose monks moved to Whalley whil…
- Near Ellesmere Port
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stanton Drew stone circles
Somerset
Geophysics in 1997 found nine concentric rings of postholes under the Great Circle - more than four hundred pits, holding timbers up to a metre thi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stanton Moor
Derbyshire
Beyond the famous Nine Ladies circle, the moor carries three further Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) rings, over seventy barrows…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Station Stones
Wiltshire
Two rough sarsens and two mounded corners trace a rectangle set precisely over Stonehenge's inner circle: a deliberate layout, not a random survival.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stavordale Priory
Somerset
An Augustinian house of the thirteenth century near Charlton Musgrove, its buildings put to other use after 1538.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stixwould Priory
Lincolnshire
Stixwould Priory records an unusually fluid female religious house: founded by Lucy of Chester, interpreted differently as Cistercian, Gilbertine a…
- Near Stixwould
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stogursey Priory
Somerset
A religious house founded around 1100 at Stogursey, with its church surviving as the parish church.
- Near Stogursey
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stone Lud
Highland
Its scale rivals the Ring of Brodgar, yet a fallen twin thirty metres off suggests it once anchored a deliberate sightline to the summer solstice s…
- Near Bower
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stone of Setter
Orkney Islands
A Late Neolithic standing stone on the island of Eday.
- Near Eday
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stone Priory
Staffordshire
A priory founded on the grave of two princes their father was said to have killed: with the story recorded in a chronicle found at the Dissolution,…
- Near Stone
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stoneleigh Abbey
Warwickshire
A Cistercian abbey turned country house, with an interior called the swan song of English baroque plasterwork: and Jane Austen among its visitors.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stonely Priory
Cambridgeshire
A modest Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose heir, after the dissolution: Henry VIII's closure of the mon…
- Near Stonely
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stonor Park
Oxfordshire
A working Catholic recusant household hid a secret printing press behind its walls in 1581: and a prehistoric (predating the written record in Brit…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stow Abbey
Lincolnshire
A ruined 11th-century Benedictine refoundation wrapped around one of England's largest Anglo-Saxon churches, carrying the tallest Saxon arches of t…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Strade Abbey
County Mayo
Within little more than a decade its community switched religious order twice and survived a fire, a turbulent start followed by six centuries of c…
- Near Claremorris
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stratfield Saye Priory
Berkshire
A priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: owned outright by a Norman abbey, a monastic house under the rule of an abbot, for ov…
- Near Beech Hill
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stratford Langthorne Abbey
Greater London
Stratford Langthorne Abbey was one of England’s largest Cistercian houses, shaping mills, bridges and marshland around West Ham before its building…
- Near Stratford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Strichen stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Destroyed twice and rebuilt twice, Strichen is less a fixed ancient monument than a 250-year argument about where its stones truly belong.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Studley Priory, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
A medieval nunnery reborn as a country house that hosted C. S. Lewis's Sunday pint and stood in on screen for Thomas More's Chelsea home.
- Near Horton-cum-Studley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Studley Priory, Warwickshire
Warwickshire
An Augustinian priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: moved here from Worcestershire, burial place of three generations of Ca…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stydd Preceptory
Derbyshire
Its 1338 accounts survive in such detail that a reader can see exactly how much wheat, barley and meat a small crusading order's guesthouse consume…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Sunhoney
Aberdeenshire
A cup-marked recumbent stone facing a specific hill has drawn five generations of archaeoastronomers to this circle, from Norman Lockyer to Clive R…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swaffham Bulbeck Priory
Cambridgeshire
Almost nothing beyond its name has survived of this Cambridgeshire priory: a reminder of how completely a small monastic house can vanish from the…
- Near Swaffham Bulbeck
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swavesey Priory
Cambridgeshire
A small Fenland village church became, within twenty years of the Conquest, the English outpost of a French abbey on the Loire: one of England's sh…
- Near Swavesey
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sweetheart Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Sweetheart Abbey preserves the personal memorial of Dervorguilla of Galloway and John de Balliol, and traces how a Cistercian house shaped the farm…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swine Cross
North Yorkshire
A weathered animal effigy on its capital may show a swine or the white boar of the Nevilles, keeping a 15th-century royal favour to Middleham legib…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swineshead Abbey
Lincolnshire
A working farmhouse built from monastic stone still stands on the site where a dying King John is said to have sheltered in 1216, and where Shakesp…
- Near Swineshead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swinford Preceptory
Leicestershire
A small Hospitaller house that never grew beyond a satellite of a larger preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar…
- Near Swinford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Swingfield Preceptory
Kent
Swingfield Preceptory records a Kent headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller whose surviving 13th-century St John’s Chapel and adapted farm buildin…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Swinside
Cumbria
Aubrey Burl called it the loveliest stone circle in north-western Europe, yet reaching it still means a mile-and-a-quarter walk uphill on foot with…
- Near Carlisle
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Talley Abbey
Carmarthenshire
The only Premonstratensian house ever founded in Wales, its lone surviving tower now rises alone over the fishponds the White Canons dug to feed th…
- Near Llandeilo
- Easy path
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Sacred place
Tan Hill stone circle
Wiltshire
Nine sarsens that a 1973 investigation thought were probably cleared field stones rather than anything prehistoric: before written records reached…
- 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
St Mawgan Monastery
Cornwall
St Mawgan Monastery preserves the deep religious continuity of Lanherne, from a sixth-century Celtic foundation through medieval manor life to succ…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Monica's Priory, Spetisbury
Dorset
St Monica’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, tells a compact story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious exile, as four different Catho…
- Near Spetisbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
St Ninian's Isle
Shetland Islands
St Ninian's Isle sits off the south-western coast of Shetland Mainland, joined to it by a 500-metre tombolo, the largest in the United Kingdom. Loc…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Saviour's Priory, Dublin
County Dublin
St Saviour's Priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: continues Dublin's Dominican tradition from a 1224 foundation through a ni…
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Trinian's Church
Isle of Man
St Trinian’s is a roofless Manx keeill on an ancient Christian site, where a 7th-century cross, medieval barony and Whithorn Priory connection meet…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Blaise's Well
Greater London
St Blaise’s Well preserves a rare Bromley pilgrimage site where a mineral spring, medieval devotional practice and the former Bishops of Rochester’…
- Near Bromley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Declan's Monastery
county-cork
A compact group of cathedral ruins, an oratory and a late round tower preserves more than eight centuries of religious building at Ardmore.
- Near Ardmore
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Francis Abbey
county-kilkenny
The ruined Franciscan church at St Francis Abbey carries Kilkenny’s medieval religious history into the later industrial landscape of the Smithwick…
- Near Kilkenny
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Glencairn
County Waterford
St Mary's Abbey (a religious community led by an abbot), Glencairn is Ireland's only Cistercian community of nuns, founded from French refugee root…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Dominican Church and Priory
County Cork
St Mary's is a continuing Dominican church, priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: and novitiate on Cork's Pope's Quay.
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St. Wolstan's Priory
County Kildare
St Wolstan's was Ireland's first dissolved monastery, preserving the remains of a Victorine priory, a smaller monastery headed by a prior, beside t…
- Near Leixlip
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stainfield Priory
Lincolnshire
Stainfield Priory was Lincolnshire’s only Benedictine nunnery, a small house of St Mary that sheltered up to twenty nuns until 1536.
- Near Wragby
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Stalldown Barrow
Devon
Stalldown Barrow is a Devon megalithic site whose long stone row contributes to the wider prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) mon…
- Near Harford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Standon Priory
Hertfordshire
One of the country's least-documented religious houses: a priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose existence survives only as a bare entry in the…
- Near Standon
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stannon stone circle
Cornwall
Stannon stone circle is a large Bodmin Moor ring whose many surviving stones and nearby Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spr…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Stripple stones
Cornwall
The Stripple Stones combine a henge (a prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) earthwork (a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the gro…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Struell Wells
County Down
Struell Wells is a managed holy-well landscape where pre-Patrick traditions, pilgrimages, chapel remains, and flowing water have shaped devotion fo…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sudbury Benedictine Priory
Suffolk
Founded by the master of the royal mint at Sudbury. Its barn, one of the best medieval barns in Suffolk, burned in 2011 and was delisted in 2023.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sudbury Priory
Suffolk
A stone sarcophagus turned up during demolition around 1820 and ended as a horse trough outside the Maldon Grey pub. It had been broken up by 1900.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sutton Camera
Herefordshire
Little survives of Sutton Camera beyond its name and a single map reference: a quiet reminder of how many small medieval priories in Herefordshire…
- Near Sutton St Nicholas
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Syon Abbey
Greater London
Syon Abbey was England’s wealthiest religious house and its only community to survive the Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monaste…
- Near Isleworth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Takeley Priory
Essex
Takeley Priory is a buried Norman foundation linking Essex and Middlesex estates to the Abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) of Sain…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Tallaght Monastery
County Dublin
Tallaght matters as the place where a monastery founded between Roman rule and the Norman arrival generated texts that still illuminate Irish devot…
- Near Tallaght
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Tamlaght Finlagan Monastery
County Londonderry
Tamlaght Finlagan preserves an early Columba-founded monastic tradition transformed into a parish church, garrison church, and Second World War bur…
- Near Limavady
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No places match those filters.