Sacred place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs Abbey
County Kerry
On the western shore of Ballinskelligs Bay, the ruined church, covered walkway and Prior's House of an Augustinian monastic house stand within a fe…
- Near Ballinskelligs
- Some walking
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 2 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballintubber Abbey
County Mayo
Ballintubber's unusual continuity lies in its Catholic use: worship continued through the penal times even after fire, suppression and Cromwellian…
- Near Ballintubber
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ballochroy
Argyll and Bute
Alexander Thom argued its central stone's flat face was cut to point exactly at sunset over a named Jura peak at the solstices: making Ballochroy o…
- Near Campbeltown
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballyboggan Abbey
County Meath
A wooden cross drew pilgrims here for centuries and met a public burning in Trim in 1538, giving this ruined priory, a monastery headed by a prior,…
- Near Kildare
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Sacred place · Medieval
Balmerino Abbey
Fife
Balmerino Abbey preserves rare Cistercian fabric on the Fife coast, including a vaulted chapter house, after centuries of destruction, residential…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Balquhain
Aberdeenshire
A rounded hump on its ten-tonne recumbent stone echoes the outline of Mither Tap behind it, and 1980s survey work found its flanking stones deliber…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Balsall Preceptory
West Midlands
One manor grew into an administrative hub controlling nine further Templar properties across Warwickshire, run by a community arrested to a man whe…
- Near Balsall Common
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Sacred place · Medieval
Baltinglass Abbey
County Wicklow
A Cistercian church that once housed 36 monks and 50 lay brothers went on to mother its own daughter house at Jerpoint, spreading the order's stone…
- Near Baltinglass
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bangor Abbey
County Down
Bangor Abbey was an early Irish centre of strict monastic learning whose teachers, manuscripts and missionaries linked County Down to Europe.
- Near Bangor
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bar Convent
North Yorkshire
Its chapel hides a full dome beneath an ordinary slate roof and conceals eight separate escape routes: architecture built by nuns who lived under p…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Barbrook One
Derbyshire
A modest ring on Ramsley Moor sits among roughly eighty prehistoric (before written records reached Britain) cairns, one of a tight cluster of ston…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bardney Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Mercian king gave up his crown to become abbot here, and the community he founded later held the disputed relics of a Northumbrian saint for two…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bardsey Island
Gwynedd
Bardsey Island is a remote Welsh pilgrimage island where a 6th-century monastic tradition, the legend of 20,000 saints, rare wildlife and dark-sky…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Barham Friary
Cambridgeshire
One of a small number of English Crutched Friars houses, its chapel of St Margaret quietly outlived the friary (a community of friars, an order tha…
- Near Barham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Barking Abbey
Greater London
For almost nine centuries its abbess outranked every other abbess in England, and the boy who fathered the Tudor dynasty was raised as a ward withi…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Barlynch Priory
Somerset
An Augustinian priory reduced to fragments of wall in a farmhouse: with its best surviving glass several miles away in another church.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Barnstaple Priory
Devon
Its founder endowed the priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, with Barnstaple's…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Barnwell Priory
Cambridgeshire
An anonymous canon here chronicled the reign of King John, and in 1388 the site hosted the only Parliament ever held outside London or Westminster.
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Barrow Camera
Derbyshire
A Knights Hospitaller administrative outpost whose stone hall survived Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s), absorbed…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Barrow Gurney Nunnery
Somerset
Minchin Barrow, a Benedictine convent so poor it transferred itself into a Welsh diocese: and ended as somebody's country house.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Basingwerk Abbey
Flintshire
One of the best-preserved Cistercian domestic ranges in Wales: chapter house, dormitory and dining hall still legible around the covered monastery…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bath Abbey
Somerset
A parish church standing on the site of a former Benedictine monastery in the centre of Bath.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Battle Abbey
East Sussex
The high altar of its ruined church was built to stand on the exact spot where King Harold reputedly fell in 1066, turning a battlefield into a mon…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bayham Old Abbey
East Sussex
Bayham’s finely carved ruins preserve a Premonstratensian abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) born from two failing monasteries, later reshaped…
- Near Lamberhurst
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beadlow Priory
Bedfordshire
A vanished Benedictine priory whose buildings disappeared so completely that by 1908 nothing stood above ground: its plan survives only because arc…
- Near Beadlow
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beaubec Abbey
County Meath
Historians have argued for a century over whether this monastery even existed at all, and it took a modern dig to give the argument physical ground…
- Near Navan
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beauchief Abbey
South Yorkshire
Historians once accused its founder of murdering Thomas Becket and building the abbey in penance: a claim later research quietly dismantled.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beaulieu Abbey
Hampshire
The only English abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) founded by King John, and populated not from a nearby house but by thirty monks sent direct…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beauvale Priory
Nottinghamshire
Beauvale is the best survivor of England’s late Carthusian expansion: a 1343 house established for a prior and twelve solitary monks.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beckford Priory
Worcestershire
Little survives above ground of the Augustinian priory itself: only a crypt beneath a country house that later served as a Catholic college and now…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bective Abbey
County Meath
Its 15th-century cloister is one of the best preserved in Ireland: and three centuries after the monks left, the ruins doubled as a medieval battle…
- Near Navan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bedale Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Bedale Market Cross anchors the town’s medieval market charter, street pattern and civic gathering place in a rare Grade I scheduled monument (desi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Bedd Arthur
Pembrokeshire
Thirteen upright stones in a broken horseshoe on a Preseli ridge, with fallen stones and a faint bank and ditch completing the outline.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beeleigh Abbey
Essex
Beeleigh Abbey preserves a rare Premonstratensian foundation near Maldon, later transformed into a farmhouse and private residence while retaining…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Begar Priory
North Yorkshire
A Carthusian cell whose ownership passed between a royal chantry, Eton College and a monastery of its own order long after its own community had va…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Belmont Abbey, Herefordshire
Herefordshire
A Victorian Catholic revival church that briefly held a monastic cathedral chapter: an arrangement last seen in England at Canterbury, Winchester a…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bentley Priory
greater-london
A medieval Augustinian cell whose site is lost, a Soane mansion built over it, a dowager queen's deathbed, and the room where the Battle of Britain…
- Near Gloucester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Berden Priory
Essex
Berden Priory’s site preserves the memory of an Essex religious house through the later Grade II* timber-framed farmhouse at the centre of Berden P…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bermondsey Abbey
Greater London
A prince was born here and a discarded queen died here centuries later: royal ties that outlasted the buildings themselves, of which only a gatehou…
- Near Gloucester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Beverley Friary
East Riding of Yorkshire
The surviving range is the guesthouse of a Dominican priory that once stood at its maximum extent by 1400: the only fragment left after the rest wa…
- Near Dunbar
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bicknacre Priory
Essex
Bicknacre Priory records an Austin Canon foundation that grew from a hermitage, struggled financially and vanished before the Dissolution (Henry VI…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Biddlesden Abbey
Northamptonshire
Biddlesden's documented history follows a small Cistercian house from a contested foundation through internal scandal, rebuilding and centuries of…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Roman
Biddlestone Chapel
Northumberland
Biddlestone Chapel is a rare Catholic chapel built into a thirteenth-century pele tower, where medieval defence, Gothic Revival worship, and wartim…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bilsington Priory
Kent
Bilsington Priory is a rare surviving Augustinian house in Kent whose 1253 foundation, local hospital and preaching role, early Dissolution (Henry…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bindon Abbey
Dorset
Bindon Abbey preserves the story of a Cistercian community that moved from a harsh coastal site to the Frome valley, thrived under royal patronage…
- Near Wool
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Binham Priory
Norfolk
Binham Priory combines a living parish church with major Benedictine ruins, including England’s earliest surviving Gothic window tracery: carved st…
- Near Binham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Birkenhead Priory
Merseyside
Birkenhead Priory is Merseyside’s oldest standing building, preserving a Benedictine foundation whose ferry rights helped connect the Wirral and Li…
- Near Birkenhead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Birkrigg stone circle
Cumbria
A double ring within a ring: twelve inner stones and twenty outer stones enclose a pavement that once covered five separate cremation burials.
- Near Ulverston
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bisham Abbey
Berkshire
Two foundations stood entwined here, a Templar manor and an Augustinian priory (a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot); when the…
- Near Bisham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Black Ladies Priory
Staffordshire
A house of Benedictine nuns founded in the mid twelfth century on the edge of Kiddemore Green.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Canterbury
Kent
Blackfriars Canterbury preserves rare fragments of a 1237 Dominican priory, a monastery run by a prior, that straddled the River Stour: its dining…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Britain's most complete surviving Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) is not a rui…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Hereford
Herefordshire
A working Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior: reduced by Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s to a handful of walls, a…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Leicester
Leicestershire
A Dominican monastery built over a Roman townhouse whose mosaics rank among Britain's finest, and beside a mass grave now linked to an 11th-century…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Oxford
Oxfordshire
The community traces an unbroken teaching tradition older than Oxford's colleges, yet the building on St Giles' dates only to 1929: a 400-year gap…
- Near Oxford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Winchelsea
East Sussex
A royal foundation that shifted site twice before settling in the heart of Winchelsea, then vanished so completely that its stones were carried off…
- Near Winchelsea
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Blakey Topping standing stones
North Yorkshire
Four surviving stones, one now doing duty as a gatepost, may be the last fragments of a stone circle or paired alignment some seventeen metres across.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blanchland Abbey
Northumberland
The monks prayed for a mist to hide them from Scottish raiders, got one, and then rang the bells in celebration.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Blue cairn circle
Aberdeenshire
The recumbent slab lies squared and deliberate rather than fallen, and the stone cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial) heaped in…
- Near Logie Coldstone
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Roman
Blue Man-i'-th'-Moss
North Yorkshire
A single weathered stone on open moorland still carries a painted name, a Victorian carving, and a boundary role that has outlived every explanatio…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Bluestonehenge
Wiltshire
A stone circle stripped of its stones, this henge: a bank and ditch enclosing a circular space: on the River Avon appears to be the very source of…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blyth Priory
Nottinghamshire
A Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, founded in 1088 by Roger de Busli as an offshoot of a French house at Rouen.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blythburgh Priory
Suffolk
The lesser of the two churches at Blythburgh, and the one that did not survive.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Priory
North Yorkshire
A west tower begun in 1520 still stands two-thirds short of its planned height, beside a nave (the western body of the building, where the congrega…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bordesley Abbey
Worcestershire
Founded during the civil war of the Anarchy and claimed by a rival for the English crown, this Cistercian ruin was also a medieval earl's burial pl…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boskednan stone circle
Cornwall
Boskednan stone circle is a partially restored late Neolithic (the first farming age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) or early Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 B…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boston Priory
Lincolnshire
The foundations of the priory, a monastery run by a prior, lay hidden beneath the parish church for nearly six hundred years, surfacing only when r…
- Near Boston
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bottesford Preceptory
Lincolnshire
The Knights Templar's Lincolnshire estate has been reduced to a scatter of loose stones and a single cross-carved gravestone: the entire surviving…
- Near Bottesford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bourne Abbey
Lincolnshire
Its church has served as Bourne's parish church continuously since the 1536 closure of the monasteries, and the abbey, a religious community led by…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boxgrove Priory
West Sussex
At the surrender there were nine religious in the house and forty-four other people: twenty-eight servants and eight children among them.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boxley Abbey
Kent
Boxley Abbey was a Cistercian house linked with Thomas Becket and Richard I whose later notoriety centred on the Rood of Grace; its scheduled preci…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boyle Abbey
County Roscommon
A daughter house of Mellifont whose ruined church still carries a squat crossing tower and carvings by the local "School of the West" masons.
- Near Boyle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bradbourne Priory
Derbyshire
Three canons once ran outlying chapelries at Tissington, Brassington and Ballidon from this monastic cell, until a 1330 deal quietly folded it into…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bradley Priory
Leicestershire
One of Leicestershire's smallest monastic houses: by 1535 it held only two canons, yet its priors sometimes doubled as heads of the far larger Leic…
- Near Nevill Holt
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Sacred place · Medieval
Breadsall Priory
Derbyshire
A tiny Augustinian house that for two centuries sat under one family's thumb: and left behind a single 13th-century arch, now buried in a hotel's c…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Breamore Priory
Hampshire
Its own last prior begged Thomas Cromwell for mercy, yet Breamore fell just below the financial threshold that doomed the smaller houses first: swe…
- Near Breamore
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Brechin Cathedral
Angus
A near-millennium-old round tower and an intricately carved Viking-age hogback stand beside a Gothic cathedral, forming one of Scotland's most comp…
- Near Brechin
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Sacred place · Medieval
Breedon Priory
Leicestershire
A parish church built from the remains of a vanished Augustinian monastery still holds the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon relief carving in Engl…
- 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
Ballinskelligs
county-kerry
Ballinskelligs brings a medieval Augustinian religious house into the coastal setting shared with the Skellig Islands and their older religious com…
- Near Ballinskelligs
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballybeg Priory
County Cork
Ballybeg is a substantial Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose exceptional medieval dovecot, a stone house…
- Near Ballybeg
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ballywiheen
County Kerry
An ogham stone raised as a grave marker around AD 500 to 550 stands within a circular enclosure on the southern flank of Croaghmarhin mountain, hal…
- Near Dingle
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Baswich Priory
Staffordshire
A monastic house under a prior, a rank below an abbot, founded in 1174 and dissolved in 1538.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bedford Abbey
Bedfordshire
A vanished Benedictine house that once held the burial of an Archbishop of York, its community later re-emerging at Newnham as an Augustinian prior…
- Near Bedford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Belvoir Priory
Leicestershire
Belvoir Priory was a small Benedictine cell of St Albans Abbey founded beside Belvoir Castle in 1076; its debt-stricken but patronised history and…
- Near Belvoir
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Sacred place · Medieval
Benedictine Priory, King's Lynn
Norfolk
King’s Lynn’s Benedictine Priory supported St Margaret’s and Norwich Cathedral from 1100 to 1537; its near-total loss makes the Minster (originally…
- Near King’s Lynn
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Sacred place · Medieval
Black Abbey
County Kilkenny
Kilkenny’s Black Abbey is a 1225 Dominican foundation restored after suppression, where Ireland’s largest stained-glass window crowns a long histor…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackborough Priory
Norfolk
Blackborough Priory was a Benedictine nunnery near King’s Lynn from about 1200 to 1537, remembered through fishpond remains, named prioresses and i…
- Near King’s Lynn
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Nine of Newcastle's craft guilds leased it in 1552 and used it as their headquarters. That is the only reason any of the town's five friaries still…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackmore Priory
Essex
Blackmore Priory survives through the fabric of its parish church, where an Augustinian community’s twelfth-century entrance and fifteenth-century…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boa Island figures
County Fermanagh
The Boa Island figures are enigmatic damaged stone idols whose two-faced form, Christian graveyard setting and uncertain Iron Age (the period from…
- Near Kesh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boarbank Hall
cumbria
A house recorded on this site since at least 1592, rebuilt in Italian style after a fire in 1870, and a working convent since 1921: with a 1986 ora…
- Near Ulverston
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmin Friary
Cornwall
A gateway and two pillars are the last visible pieces of a large Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the stre…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmiscombe Preceptory
Devon
Bodmiscombe Preceptory records a thirteenth-century Knights Hospitaller house whose absorption into Buckland Abbey preserves Devon’s link to the or…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey
North Yorkshire
Bolton Abbey joins an Augustinian priory, a living parish church and a vast Wharfedale estate in a layered Yorkshire Dales landscape.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey, Moone
County Kildare
A modern Cistercian monastery in County Kildare, founded from Roscrea in 1965 and independent since 1977, where monastic life is supported by a wor…
- Near Moone
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bonamargy Friary
County Antrim
Bonamargy Friary preserves a late Franciscan foundation where MacQuillan, MacDonnell, burial, legend and manuscript histories meet beside the Margy…
- Near Ballycastle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bonby Priory
Lincolnshire
Bonby Priory’s surviving St Andrew’s Church is the last trace of a Benedictine alien priory connected with St Fromond Priory between 1199 and 1403.
- Near Bonby
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boscawen-Un
Cornwall
Boscawen-Ûn is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) stone circle whose nineteen-stone ellipse, distinctive central slab and…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boswens Menhir
Cornwall
Boswens Menhir is a compact but distinctive Penwith standing stone, with a vestigial cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial) and c…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bradenstoke Priory
Wiltshire
A house of Augustinian canons set on the ridge above the south side of Dauntsey Vale, a mile and a half west of Lyneham.
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