Sacred place · Prehistoric
Wheebin standing stone
orkney-islands
Livestock have polished the lower half of this stone smooth by rubbing against it; a deep crevice runs from the middle to the top.
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 14 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 49 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wherwell Abbey
Hampshire
A community of Benedictine nuns that grew, under one determined abbess, to eighty strong and left behind a psalter now kept at Cambridge: one of th…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Whetstones (stone circle)
Powys
A large stone circle blown up in the 1860s, whose only recorded contents are the charcoal and bones somebody noticed as the last stone came out.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Whistones Priory
Shropshire
A Cistercian nunnery whose surrender was never recorded: but which gave a Worcestershire village the name White Ladies Aston.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Whitby Abbey
North Yorkshire
A ruined church on the East Cliff that hosted the 664 Synod deciding how all of England would date Easter, then gave Bram Stoker the setting for Dr…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
White Ladies Priory
Shropshire
Charles II hid here after Worcester in 1651. Nobody knows who founded it: no layman ever claimed the right to name its prioress.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Whitefriars, Coventry
West Midlands
One surviving cloister range carries four centuries of reuse under a single roof: friary, Tudor mansion, grammar school and workhouse: with both El…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Whitehill Wood, Aberdeenshire
Aberdeenshire
Two dating estimates over a thousand years apart - Sir Norman Lockyer's 1200 BC and Historic Environment Scotland's roughly 4500 years old - sit on…
- Near Aberchirder
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Whitland Abbey
Carmarthenshire
The Cistercian house whose monks went out to found three more Welsh abbeys, and the place where a blinded prince chose to live out his final years…
- Near Whitland
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wicklow Friary
County Wicklow
Excavations in 2022–23 uncovered the remains of several friars beneath the ruined church: a rare direct encounter with the community that once pray…
- Near Wicklow
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wigmore Abbey
Herefordshire
Burial place of five Earls of March and the Mortimer dynasty that once contended for the English throne: later the private home of a television star.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wigmore Abbey Grange
Herefordshire
A working farmhouse that began as an abbot's private lodging, carrying Norman stonework and three centuries of separately listed farm buildings beh…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Willoughton Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Not a minor outpost: this was the richest of all the English Templar houses, and its estate outlived the order itself by two centuries, passing thr…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
Willoughton Priory
Lincolnshire
Nothing built here survives above ground, yet the earthworks alone preserve the outline of a French abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wilmington Priory
East Sussex
Wilmington Priory records how a small Norman Benedictine cell became a fortified agricultural grange, then a secular estate and carefully conserved…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Wilsford Henge
Wiltshire
A ceremonial ditch invisible on the ground but confirmed by geophysics, standing barely a kilometre from Marden Henge, one of Britain's largest, ac…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wilton Abbey
Wiltshire
For over a century its abbess held an entire barony from the crown, one of only four English nunneries with that status, and its cloister (the cove…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wimborne Minster (church)
Dorset
Wimborne Minster is a 1,300-year religious landmark, notable for its Saxon royal associations, Norman fabric, astronomical clock and one of the wor…
- Near Wimborne Minster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Winchcombe Abbey
Gloucestershire
Once one of Mercia's richest monasteries and burial place of a king venerated as a saint, almost nothing survives beyond a stone cross and a scatte…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Winchester Cathedral Priory
Hampshire
A single community of monks served this cathedral for close to six centuries, surviving Viking attacks and shrinking numbers before Henry VIII clos…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Winterbourne Bassett Stone Circle
Wiltshire
A vanished ring near Avebury whose original scale: two concentric rings some 71 metres across: survives only in an 1880s antiquarian (an early coll…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Witham Charterhouse
Somerset
Witham Charterhouse was England's earliest Carthusian house, founded by Henry II as penance and now preserved through parish use, earthworks and fi…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Witham Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Excavation uncovered the full plan of a working Templar farmstead of eighteen buildings: barns, kilns, a hall keep and a rare rectangular chapel, u…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
Withyham Priory
East Sussex
A Sussex estate run for over three centuries by a lone monk answering to a Norman abbey: until the Hundred Years' War made such cross-Channel loyal…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Withypool Stone Circle
Somerset
Withypool preserves one of only two surviving Exmoor stone circles, a small-stone monument set among a dense landscape of ancient burial mounds.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Woburn Abbey
Bedfordshire
A Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) pulled down by its own owners and rebuilt three times over, yet the family that dissolve…
- Near Woburn
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wolston Priory
Warwickshire
A small alien priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: whose rectory became the farmhouse where some of the Martin Marprela…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wombridge Priory
Shropshire
A solvent priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: dissolved for being small, whose church became a coach house and then a catt…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Woodbury Hill, Dorset
Dorset
Woodbury Hill combines an Iron Age hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement dating from from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest: with a medieval…
- Near Bere Regis
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Woodhenge
Wiltshire
The timber rings share Stonehenge's scale and midsummer alignment almost exactly, evidence that wood, not just stone, could carry serious ceremonia…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Woodspring Priory
Somerset
Woodspring Priory preserves a rare Victorine religious complex whose church, infirmary and barn chart medieval devotion, farming and post-Dissoluti…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wootton Wawen Priory
Warwickshire
A priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: of one prior and one monk, granted to King's College Cambridge in 1443, with nothing…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Worcester Cathedral
Worcestershire
A working cathedral since 680 that still buries a king between two vanished saints' shrines, beneath a Norman crypt no later rebuilding ever touched.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Worksop Priory
Nottinghamshire
The surviving main body of the parish church keeps alive an Augustinian monastic community whose manuscripts, including the Worksop Bestiary and Ti…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Wormy Hillock Henge
Aberdeenshire
An 1891 dig aimed at a supposed sheep enclosure found nothing at all: evidence that this mini-henge, a small circular enclosure from before written…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Wren's Egg
Dumfries and Galloway
A large glacial erratic sits in a field in the parish of Glasserton, in what was historically Wigtownshire, and gives its name to the whole monumen…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wroxton Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Jacobean house west of Banbury, its 1727 garden partly reworked in the serpentine style after 1731.
- Near Wroxton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wymondham Abbey
Norfolk
Wymondham Abbey's d’Aubigny foundation, difficult shared use, 1449 independence and partial sixteenth-century destruction explain how a monastic ch…
- Near Wymondham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wyresdale Abbey
Lancashire
A Cistercian house that barely lasted a generation before folding back into its mother house at Furness: yet it left a village bearing its name.
- Near Abbeystead
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Yonder Bognie
Aberdeenshire
One of more than seventy recumbent stone circles unique to lowland Aberdeenshire, its closest architectural parallels lie not in Scotland but in so…
- Near Huntly
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
York Franciscan Friary
North Yorkshire
A friary that once housed medieval nobility now survives as a single stone wall: one of the few physical traces of York's four medieval friaries to…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Youghal Priory
County Cork
Oliver Cromwell made this decommissioned hospital-monastery his personal headquarters through the winter of 1649, turning a building built for pray…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Yr Hen Gapel, Llanybri
Carmarthenshire
Believed to be the only Welsh church ever converted from Anglican to non-conformist worship: a reversal contemporaries themselves called remarkable.
- Near Llanybri
- 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 · Prehistoric
Whitcastles stone circle
Dumfries and Galloway
Nine stones lie fallen in an oval on high ground north-east of Lockerbie, none of them still standing. The setting, known as Whitcastles or Little…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
White Abbey, Kildare
County Kildare
White Abbey links the de Vesci foundation and earls of Kildare to a Carmelite site whose ground, well and colour-name outlived Tudor closure.
- Near Kildare
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
White Horse Stone
Kent
The White Horse Stone is a scheduled Blue Bell Hill sarsen with possible Neolithic (the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) roots, later folkl…
- Near Blue Bell Hill
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
White Island, County Fermanagh
County Fermanagh
White Island preserves an early medieval: roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans: Lough Erne church whose Romanesque: the round-ar…
- Near Kesh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Wix Priory
Essex
Wix Priory is a rare surviving trace of a medieval Benedictine nunnery in Essex: although the convent buildings vanished, its priory church continu…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Yellowmead stone circle
Devon
Yellowmead is a rare Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) concentric stone circle of four rings, with excavated evidence of a…
- Near Sheepstor
- Rough ground
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