Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgend Priory
Lincolnshire
A modest Gilbertine house whose founding endowment bound its canons to keep a fenland causeway in repair: an obligation that outlasted the priory,…
- Near Horbling
- Easy path
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 3 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgetown Priory
County Cork
One of only two substantial Augustinian monasteries left standing in County Cork, its unusual H-shaped plan surviving because the west range was si…
- Near Castletownroche
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bridlington Priory
East Riding of Yorkshire
Bridlington Priory’s surviving nave: the western body of the building, where the congregation gathered: is the parish-church remnant of a vast Augu…
- Near Bridlington
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Sacred place · Medieval
Brimpsfield Priory
Gloucestershire
A Norman lord's endowment to a monastery across the Channel made Brimpsfield a casualty of England's wars with France, seized as an overseas religi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Brinkburn Priory
Northumberland
A priory church whose roof fell in before 1700 and was put back in 1858: with most of its twelfth-century masonry still standing underneath.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bristol Cathedral
Bristol
Its 14th-century choir has no clerestory at all: light floods in only through vast aisle windows the same height as the vault, a design the histori…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Brisworthy stone circle
Devon
Brisworthy’s restored circle makes the loss and recovery of a Dartmoor ritual monument visible: twenty-four stones stand where perhaps forty-two on…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Broadholme Priory
Lincolnshire
One of only two Premonstratensian houses for women anywhere in England, its canonesses living and singing on this Lincolnshire site for nearly four…
- Near Broadholme
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Broadlea henge
Dumfries and Galloway
A Roman marching camp's ditch cuts clean through Broadlea henge: a circular enclosure formed by a bank and an inner ditch: entering by the north-we…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bromfield Priory
Shropshire
A college of canons founded before 1061, which lost half its land between 1066 and 1086: and whose church is still the parish church.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bromholm Priory
Norfolk
Bromholm Priory was a Grade I Cluniac house near Bacton, famed for a claimed relic of the True Cross that made it a major medieval pilgrimage desti…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bromley-by-Bow
Greater London
Its priory, a monastery headed by a prior, had a chapel that outlived the nunnery itself by four centuries, surviving as the district's parish chur…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Brooke Priory
Rutland
A priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: kept for three canons, which a bishop called a scandal to the neighbourhood in 1…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bruisyard Abbey
Suffolk
A religious house at Bruisyard, founded by Maud of Lancaster and Lionel of Antwerp in the 1360s.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bruton Abbey
Somerset
A religious house in Bruton, founded around 1127 and closed in 1539.
- Near Bruton
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Bryn Cader Faner
Gwynedd
Bryn Cader Faner is a striking late-third-millennium-BC round cairn: a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial: near Talsarnau, distinguishe…
- Near Talsarnau
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Bryn Gwyn stones
Isle of Anglesey
Excavation recovered the pits of five stones destroyed by treasure hunters in 1797, letting archaeologists reconstruct a Neolithic circle of eight:…
- Near Brynsiencyn
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Buckfast Abbey
Devon
Buckfast Abbey is a rare monastic site with Anglo-Saxon origins, a wealthy medieval Cistercian phase, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the mona…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Buckland Abbey
Devon
Buckland Abbey is an unusually intact Cistercian church converted into a house, where the monastic foundation, Grenville and Drake ownership, and N…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Buckland Priory
Somerset
The only house the Knights Hospitaller kept for women in England. They stopped appointing preceptors to it after 1433.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Buildwas Abbey
Shropshire
A Cistercian house whose abbots doubled as royal agents in Ireland and Wales, undone across two centuries by extortion, a murdered abbot, Welsh rai…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bullington Priory
Lincolnshire
Bullington Priory was a Gilbertine double house of canons and nuns whose endowments and surviving charter series illuminate medieval Lincolnshire m…
- Near Bullington
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bungay Priory
Suffolk
A Benedictine nunnery founded by a countess on her own marriage lands, whose church still serves Bungay as its parish church.
- Near Bungay
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burford Priory
Oxfordshire
A Cotswold country house built over a medieval hospital has sheltered a Jacobean Speaker of the Commons, a community of Anglican monks and nuns, an…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burnham Abbey
Buckinghamshire
A community of Augustinian nuns founded in 1265 still occupies the site today, under a different order but the same name and the same walls.
- Near Burnham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burnham Norton Friary
Norfolk
Burnham Norton Friary was the first Carmelite monastery founded after the order’s expulsion from Mount Carmel, and its gatehouse, precinct wall, ch…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Burnmoor stone circles
Cumbria
Five separate rings spread across roughly a square mile make this the most extensive stone circle complex on Cumbria's western fells, each ring pai…
- Near Ravenglass
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burriscarra Abbey
County Mayo
Founded for one religious order in 1298, the priory was formally reassigned to another by papal decree in 1413: a rare, dated paper trail for a sma…
- Near Claremorris
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burrishoole Friary
County Mayo
Founded without papal consent in 1469, the friary needed a formal pardon from Rome seventeen years later: a rare, documented case of a foundation o…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burscough Priory
Lancashire
Burscough Priory was an Augustinian house and major Stanley burial place whose surviving crossing piers preserve the outline of a lost monastic chu…
- Near Burscough
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burton Abbey
Staffordshire
A monastery founded by St Modwen and refounded under an abbot in 1003 by the thegn Wulfric Spot.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bury St Edmunds Abbey
Suffolk
In October 1327 monks walked into the parish church, threw off their habits to show armour underneath and took hostages. The townspeople burned the…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bushmead Priory
Bedfordshire
Only the refectory, where a small Augustinian community ate, and its kitchen survive, roofed by a rare king-post timber frame that has stood since…
- Near Bushmead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Butley Priory
Suffolk
An Augustinian house founded by Ranulf de Glanville in 1171 and suppressed in 1538.
- Near Butley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Buttevant Franciscan Friary
County Cork
A friary porch that once doubled as the town's law court: leases signed, marriages contracted, fealty sworn: until a Parliamentarian army burned th…
- Near Buttevant
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Byland Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its ruined west front still holds half a stone rose window that inspired York Minster's own, and a monk here wrote down twelve ghost stories now re…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cahir Abbey
County Tipperary
A working priory, a monastery headed by a prior, whose altar end, tower and covered walkway survive largely intact from three separate building cam…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Calder Abbey
Cumbria
A refounded Savigniac house that turned Cistercian, its ruined crossing tower still standing beside a private house built into the monks' own domes…
- Near Egremont
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Sacred place · Medieval
Caldey Priory
Pembrokeshire
A twelfth-century island priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: that never held more than a handful of monks, and whose c…
- Near Caldey Island
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Sacred place · Medieval
Caldwell Priory
Bedfordshire
A priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose canons armed a royal siege, fought a bishop's tithe collectors for two centurie…
- Near Bedford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Calke Priory
Derbyshire
A priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot, whose canons left for Rep…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Callan Augustinian Friary
County Kilkenny
Callan Augustinian Friary preserves a late-medieval observant foundation and its celebrated stone seats for clergy beside a holy well whose local h…
- Near Callan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Callanish IV
Outer Hebrides
Five stones stand today at Callanish IV, arranged in a pronounced oval measuring 13.3 by 9.5 metres on open moorland southeast of the main Callanis…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Calwich Abbey
Staffordshire
A priory of about 1130, then a country house, then another rebuilt in 1849: each demolished for the next, with Handel and Rousseau among the guests.
- Near Ellastone
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cambridge Blackfriars
Cambridgeshire
A medieval friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among the towns instead of apart from them) suppressed in 1538 and built over by a Ca…
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cambridge Whitefriars
Cambridgeshire
A single garden wall in a Cambridge college is all that remains visible of a Carmelite friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked…
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cammeringham Priory
Lincolnshire
Two rival Norman abbeys fought over ownership of this small house for decades: a dispute settled only in 1192: and today its entire physical trace…
- Near Cammeringham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Campsey Priory
Suffolk
A house of Augustinian canonesses at Campsea Ashe, south-east of Wickham Market.
- Near Campsea Ashe
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Sacred place · Medieval
Canon Island Abbey
County Clare
Canon Island Abbey preserves the ruins of an Augustinian community on the Shannon, tracing a medieval foundation, devastation, dissolution (Henry V…
- Near Inis Cealtra
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Canons Ashby Priory
Northamptonshire
A single parish church is nearly all that remains visible of a four-century Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, yet a licensed watercou…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Canonsleigh Abbey
Devon
Canonsleigh Abbey preserves the fragmentary remains of a Devon religious house that changed from an Augustinian priory, a monastery headed by a pri…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Canterbury Cathedral
Kent
Canterbury Cathedral is England’s historic primatial church: founded in 597, transformed by Thomas Becket’s 1170 martyrdom and the resulting pilgri…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Capel Lligwy
isle-of-anglesey
A roofless twelfth-century chapel on Anglesey whose purpose was never recorded, carrying an unusual sixteenth-century south chapel with a burial va…
- Near Moelfre
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cardigan Priory
Ceredigion
A Benedictine cell whose ownership was fought over by two English abbeys, then reused across nine centuries as mansion, poet's home and hospital.
- Near Cardigan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Carfury Standing Stone
Cornwall
The three-metre Carfury slab is unusually revealing because the 1957–58 excavation recorded its elliptical socket and packing stones, even though i…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carlingford Abbey
County Louth
Twin fifteenth-century towers turned a quiet Dominican church into something closer to a fortress, and the friars kept a claim on it, on and off, f…
- Near Carlingford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Cathedral
Cumbria
England's second-smallest ancient cathedral holds the country's largest and most complex Flowing Decorated Gothic window, a rarity from an Augustin…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Dominican Friary
Cumbria
A vanished friary whose foundations, once dug into, turned out to sit directly on top of Roman Carlisle: one plot of ground holding two buried towns.
- Near Carlisle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Franciscan Friary
Cumbria
One of a small number of Franciscan houses built inside a cathedral city, standing beside Carlisle Cathedral for three centuries before the Dissolu…
- Near Carlisle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carmelite Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
One of only four mendicant orders licensed to settle in medieval England, the White Friars kept a house in Winchester for two and a half centuries…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carrow Abbey
Norfolk
Carrow Abbey preserves a Benedictine nunnery’s unusually detailed history of female governance, legal dispute and financial recovery, followed by d…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cartmel Priory
Cumbria
When Henry VIII's commissioners came to demolish the priory, the parish church alone survived: saved only because villagers petitioned to keep thei…
- Near Cartmel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cartmel Priory Gatehouse
Cumbria
One of only two structures left standing from an entire monastic complex, it escaped demolition at the Reformation, the sixteenth-century break wit…
- Near Cartmel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Acre Priory
Norfolk
Castle Acre Priory is a major Cluniac ruin whose relocation from the castle, direct link to Burgundy, mid-fourteenth-century legal adaptation and r…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Castle Dykes Henge
North Yorkshire
A near-intact Neolithic: the first farming age, roughly 4000–2500 BC: henge, a circular enclosure ringed by a bank with its ditch set within, that…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Semple Collegiate Church
Renfrewshire
A church served by a college of priests, near the eastern end of Castle Semple Loch.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Castledermot Abbey
County Kildare
Castledermot Abbey preserves the site of an early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) monastery and a later Francisc…
- Near Castledermot
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Sacred place · Medieval
Castlelyons Friary
County Cork
A friary founded by Anglo-Norman lords, dissolved by Henry VIII, handed on to an earl's daughter, then revived for the Dominicans: its stones chang…
- Near Castlelyons
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Castlerigg stone circle
Cumbria
An internal rectangle of ten stones sits inside the ring, a feature almost unknown among British stone circles and never satisfactorily explained.
- Near Keswick
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Catesby Priory
Northamptonshire
A Northamptonshire nunnery whose prioress, Margaret Rich, was sister to a canonised archbishop, and whose confiscated land later passed to the fami…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Catholic National Library
Hampshire
Its 70,000 volumes were saved from being scattered in 1997 by a campaign of Catholic writers and noblemen, then found refuge for seven years inside…
- Near Farnborough
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Sacred place · Medieval
Catley Priory
Lincolnshire
A vanished double house of nuns and canons that once held an entire island, a parish church, and grazing for four hundred sheep: now reduced to a s…
- Near Walcott
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cerne Abbey
Dorset
Cerne Abbey was a major Benedictine house founded in 987, whose surviving guest house, porch, barns and gatehouse fabric preserve a millennium of m…
- Near Cerne Abbas
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chacombe Priory
Northamptonshire
A minor Augustinian house whose closing is caught in the visiting commissioner's own uneasy words: and whose burial ground held three generations o…
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Sacred place · Roman
Chalice Well
Somerset
A spring that has run at 25,000 gallons a day without once failing, through droughts, and stains everything it touches red.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel Finian and Chapel Finian Well
Dumfries and Galloway
Only the foundations remain of Chapel Finian, a small chapel built between the 10th and 11th centuries on an old raised beach at Corwall Port, on t…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel of St Fyndoca
Argyll and Bute
A carved grave-slab bearing arms for a galley and a boar's head ties this island ruin to the Campbells of Lochow, in a graveyard still used eight c…
- Near Cladich
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel of St Non
Pembrokeshire
Roofless walls facing the coast south of St Davids, beside a holy well, on ground tradition names as a birthplace.
- Near St Davids
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Charterhouse, Kingston upon Hull
East Riding of Yorkshire
A working almshouse since the 14th century, its chapel holding the tomb of a duke whose widow, Alice Chaucer, insisted he be buried here rather tha…
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgwater Friary
Somerset
A Franciscan house founded by William Briwere in 1245 and dissolved in 1538.
- Near Bridgwater
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Sacred place · Medieval
Brightley Priory
Devon
Brightley was the short-lived first Cistercian religious house whose infertile land prompted a move to Thorncombe, creating the community that beca…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Brixworth Abbey
Northamptonshire
Brixworth’s lost monastic house is remembered through a church devastated in 876 and remade as All Saints’ in the tenth century.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bromhall Priory
Berkshire
A small Benedictine nunnery whose downfall came over a decade before Henry VIII's dissolution: condemned outright by a papal bull as a 'profane pla…
- Near Sunningdale
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bulstrode Preceptory
Buckinghamshire
A single act of corruption by its preceptor is nearly all that survives of Bulstrode: a house so obscure it never earned proper commandery status o…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burstead Grange
Essex
Burstead Grange is a deliberately cautious entry in Essex’s monastic landscape: its name suggests estate management, while records cannot yet ident…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burtle Priory
Somerset
A hermitage at Sprauellissmede endowed by William son of Godfrey of Eddington in 1199, a monastic house under a prior by 1312.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Burwell Priory
Lincolnshire
Burwell Priory was a Benedictine alien cell dependent on Grande-Sauve Abbey in Aquitaine, making its fate closely tied to medieval Anglo-French con…
- Near Burwell
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Callanish II
Outer Hebrides
Seven thin standing stones rise from a ridge overlooking Loch Roag, on the western side of Lewis, set out in an ellipse measuring 21.6 by 18.9 metr…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Callanish III
Outer Hebrides
Two concentric ellipses of stone stand on the moor above Loch Roag on the Isle of Lewis, forming Callanish III: Gaelic name Cnoc Fillibhir Bheag. T…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Callanish VIII
Outer Hebrides
Four standing stones rise in a semicircle along a cliff edge on the southern side of Great Bernera, looking out over the narrow strait that separat…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cannington Priory
Somerset
A Benedictine nunnery of about 1138, dissolved in 1536 and afterwards turned into a mansion.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Canwell Priory
Staffordshire
A tenant destroyed the ruins in the seventeenth century after exhuming coffins and forming a pool of water below them. What looks like medieval wor…
- Near Hints
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cardinham Grange
Cornwall
Cardinham Grange records the transfer of a Norman-era religious gift into the monastic economy of Tywardreath and, after dissolution (Henry VIII's…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carisbrooke Priory
Isle of Wight
Carisbrooke Priory represents both a medieval Norman dependency dissolved in wartime politics and a separate modern Dominican community that later…
- Near Newport
-
Sacred place
Carmelite Monastery, Wolverhampton
West Midlands
A community of enclosed Carmelite nuns has kept a life of prayer running in the middle of an industrial Midlands city since 1922, having crossed fr…
- Near Wolverhampton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Carrick Church
County Fermanagh
Carrick Church binds a 1483 O’Flanagan foundation to a 1528 family murder, while its graveyard and holy-well tradition preserve a long-lived sacred…
- Near Enniskillen
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Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Hedingham Priory
Essex
Castle Hedingham Priory was one of a small group of women-only southern English nunneries, whose brief, troubled history ends with the Dissolution…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cat Stane
City of Edinburgh
The Cat Stane combines a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) standing stone with a fifth- or sixth-century Latin funerary in…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Chapel Carn Brea
Cornwall
A granite hill where Neolithic tombs: from the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in Britain: and Bronze Age remains: roughly 2500–800 BC: share…
- Near St Just
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Charley Priory
Leicestershire
Charley Priory records the fluid identity of a small medieval religious house: a Norman-linked gift, an independent three-monk hermitage, a later A…
- Near Charley
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