Sacred place · Medieval
Chatteris Abbey
Cambridgeshire
One of a small number of English monasteries built specifically for Benedictine nuns, and one where parish worship inside the abbey (a religious co…
- Near Chatteris
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 4 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cheetham Close
Greater Manchester
Cheetham Close is a damaged Early Bronze Age ritual landscape near Greater Manchester, where a broken stone circle, ring cairn (a mound of piled st…
- Near Turton
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chertsey Abbey
Surrey
A Benedictine monastery at Chertsey, dedicated to St Peter.
- Near Chertsey
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Cathedral
Cheshire
A working cathedral built in three distinct campaigns over five centuries, its Norman core still visible beneath a Gothic rebuild that took more th…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Priory
Cheshire
Chester Priory records the presence of a Benedictine community of nuns in medieval Cheshire, even though the available account preserves only its p…
- Near Chester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chichester Cathedral
West Sussex
The seat of the Bishop of Chichester since 1075, when the bishopric was moved into the city.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chicksands Priory
Bedfordshire
One of only ten English religious houses where nuns and canons lived side by side: later a Cold War listening post hidden inside a medieval priory,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chipley Priory
Suffolk
A taxation roll of 1291 puts this small religious house at under £5 a year. By 1455 the buildings were ruins, and a stone coffin from the site now…
- Near Poslingford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Christ Church, Oxford
Oxfordshire
The only academic institution in the world that is also a cathedral, Christ Church became simultaneously a college chapel and a bishop's seat by ro…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Christ the King, Cockfosters
Greater London
Its plain reinforced concrete design is one of England's earliest buildings shaped by the continental Liturgical Movement, raised for a monastic co…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Christchurch Priory
Dorset
Christchurch Priory is one of England’s longest parish churches, preserving a thousand-year sequence from Saxon church through Augustinian priory t…
- Near Christchurch
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church Island (Valentia Harbour)
County Kerry
On the south-west shore of a one-acre island in Valentia Harbour stands an ogham stone inscribed not only with letters but with a Maltese cross, a…
- Near Valentia
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Mary and All Saints, Whalley
Lancashire
Whalley’s Grade I church links Anglo-Saxon crosses, a thirteenth-century parish church and an exceptional collection of medieval and later furnishi…
- Near Whalley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Morwenna and St John the Baptist, Morwenstow
Cornwall
Cornwall's most northerly parish church combines Norman fabric, Parson Hawker's harvest tradition and a churchyard shaped by the wreck of the Caled…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Peter, Holton-le-Clay
Lincolnshire
A carved wooden mouse on the altar rail, a Saxon tower arch, and a separately scheduled medieval cross all survive within one small parish churchyard.
- Near Holton-le-Clay
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of the Holy Rude
Stirling
One of only three churches still in use in Britain where a monarch has been crowned: and for 280 years it was two churches, divided by a wall down…
- Near Stirling
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cirencester Abbey
Gloucestershire
A 1254 valuation put its income from nineteen granted churches alone at £350 a year, over half a million pounds today, funding one of England's mos…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Clach an Trushal
Outer Hebrides
On the west side of Lewis, in the village of Ballantrushal, a single grey pillar of stone rises 5.8 metres out of the machair. Clach an Trushal is…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clane Friary
County Kildare
A single ruined church holds two religious lives at once: an early Gaelic monastery that hosted a national synod, and a Franciscan house of friars…
- Near Clane
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Abbey
County Clare
Clare Abbey was County Clare’s largest Augustinian house, a riverbank monastery whose founding, battle history, architecture and later dissolution…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Island Abbey
County Mayo
Cistercian monks rarely painted their walls, yet here dragons, a harper and grazing stags survive, and tradition ties the canopied tomb within to G…
- Near Clare Island
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Priory
Suffolk
The first house of the Augustinian Friars in England, established in 1248 on the bank of the Stour.
- Near Clare
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Sacred place · Medieval
Claregalway Friary
county-galway
A 24-metre tower, church ruins and the remains of community buildings record the long life of a Franciscan house at Claregalway.
- Near Claregalway
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clattercote Priory
Oxfordshire
This Oxfordshire monastery began life as a hospital for the sick, and a manor house has occupied its cleared ground since the seventeenth century.
- Near Clattercote
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cleeve Abbey
Somerset
In 1400 the abbot and three of his monks were reported to the government for leading a band of 200 robbers attacking travellers.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clerkenwell Priory
Greater London
Headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller in England for four centuries, and the site where Richard III publicly abandoned his plan to marry his own…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clonard Abbey
County Meath
A single monk's cell beside the Boyne grew into the school that trained several of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, and for a century was the seat o…
- Near Clonard
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Sacred place
Clonard Monastery
County Antrim
Built for Belfast’s growing Catholic working-class population, Clonard became a religious refuge at the Troubles interface and a setting for the qu…
- Near Belfast
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clones Abbey
County Monaghan
A round tower missing the doorway arch typical of its age, a two-faced high cross, and a sarcophagus reputed to hold the founder's remains: survivo…
- Near Clones
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Clonmacnoise
County Offaly
A river crossing where the Slighe Mhór met the Shannon drew high kings, scholars and craftsmen from across Europe for centuries, leaving Ireland's…
- Near Clonmacnoise
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clontuskert Abbey
County Galway
Its 1471 west doorway is the site's most distinctive surviving feature, at the monastic house ruled for centuries by one family.
- Near Loughrea
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cockersand Abbey
Lancashire
A single vaulted chapter house, still roofed and intact, is all that remains standing of what was once the third-richest abbey (a religious communi…
- Near Cockerham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Coggeshall Abbey
Essex
Coggeshall Abbey is a major surviving Cistercian landscape, where chapel, undercroft: the vaulted storage space beneath a building: and vast tithe…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cole Park
Wiltshire
A royal Tudor stud-farm built on the bones of a monastic deer-park, its moat still tracing ground the Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) of Mal…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
College of All Saints, Maidstone
Kent
Maidstone’s College of All Saints preserves the surviving buildings of a 1395 ecclesiastical college whose Perpendicular architecture, gatehouse an…
- Near Maidstone
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Colmeallie stone circle
Angus
By 1853, elderly locals in Glen Esk still recalled the circle looking fuller, before stone-robbing thinned it: a rare glimpse of a monument's decli…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Colne Priory
Essex
Colne Priory was the de Vere family’s long-lived mausoleum and a Benedictine house whose buried remains still surface beneath the lawns of its late…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Combermere Abbey
Cheshire
A rendered Gothic facade hides a genuine 1502 monastic roof timber frame: one of only three surviving hammerbeam roofs in Cheshire, still standing…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Coneybury Henge
Wiltshire
A vanished henge: a prehistoric earthwork of bank and ditch enclosing a circular space, with the ditch inside the bank: whose ditch enclosed a timb…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cong Abbey
County Mayo
A High King built his last home here and died within its walls, and its greatest treasure, the Cross of Cong, took its name from this riverside rui…
- Near Cong
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Conishead Priory
Cumbria
A medieval hospital reborn three times over: as an Augustinian priory, a vast Victorian mansion, and a miners' convalescent home: before becoming,…
- Near Ulverston
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cookhill Priory
Worcestershire
A Cistercian nunnery so poor it was repeatedly excused royal taxation now survives as a farmhouse holding a recording studio and a tax case that re…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Coombe Abbey
Warwickshire
Coombe is Warwickshire’s largest medieval Cistercian house, whose unusual survival inside a Tudor country house lets the monastery’s fabric remain…
- Near Coombe Fields
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Corcomroe Abbey
County Clare
Corcomroe Abbey is a Cistercian ruin in the Burren whose exceptional Gothic carving, royal tomb and long record of monastic adaptation show how a r…
- Near Ballyvaughan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cornworthy Priory
Devon
Cornworthy Priory preserves the record of an Augustinian nunnery whose post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) esta…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Coverham Abbey
North Yorkshire
A knight's stone effigy still leans against a garden wall here, carved with a stag hunt at his feet: the last fragment of a community twice founded…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Coxford Priory
Norfolk
Coxford Priory is a small but legible Augustinian foundation whose move from East Rudham to Coxford records how a twelfth-century community reshape…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Craswall Priory
Herefordshire
Built for the Order of Grandmont in the 1220s, Craswall Priory's surviving ruins are now so fragile that Historic England lists them among heritage…
- Near Craswall
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Creake Abbey
Norfolk
Creake Abbey is a Grade I Augustinian ruin where an almshouse became an abbey, medieval charitable care endured, and a 1506 epidemic abruptly ended…
- Near North Creake
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Sacred place · Medieval
Creevelea Abbey
County Leitrim
The last Franciscan friary, a house of friars, founded in Ireland before Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries later ran a hedge school where pio…
- Near Dromahair
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Crooke Preceptory
County Waterford
A ruined church whose thick, shell-flecked mortar and chiselled quoins still show the hand of masons working for an order that once held both Templ…
- Near Waterford
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Crossraguel Abbey
South Ayrshire
A ruined Cluniac monastery near Maybole that still keeps its church, covered walkways and dovecote.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Crowland Abbey
Lincolnshire
A hermit's cell on a Fen island grew into a Benedictine house that produced a disputed medieval chronicle, a skull-relic stolen and later returned…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Croxden Abbey
Staffordshire
The monks of this abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, barricaded themselves inside for sixteen weeks in 1319 against their own patron, and paid…
- Near Croxden
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Croxton Abbey
Leicestershire
An abbot of Croxton embalmed King John's body in 1216 and buried his heart in the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) church, a rare dire…
- Near Croxton Kerrial
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cuckoo Stone
Wiltshire
A squat sarsen lying forgotten in a field turned out, on excavation, to have replaced a wooden post on the very same spot before 2000 BC: a rare ph…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cullerlie stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Each of its eight cairns is fenced by its own ring of kerbstones and holds cremated remains, making the circle a burial ground built inside a ring…
- Near Echt
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cwmhir Abbey
Powys
An abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: begun on a cathedral's scale and abandoned once its nave, the long western body of the church, was up. It…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cymer Abbey
Gwynedd
Cymer Abbey is a modest Cistercian foundation at the meeting of waters, whose plain surviving church reveals both regional monastic life and the pr…
- Near Dolgellau
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dale Abbey (ruin)
Derbyshire
Three separate colonies of canons failed to survive here before Dale finally took root in 1204: and the chronicler who later told its story hid his…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dartford Priory
Kent
Dartford Priory was a royal Dominican nunnery whose foundation after Crécy and conversion into Henry VIII’s palace place it at the intersection of…
- Near Dartford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dartmouth Friary
Devon
Dartmouth Friary’s short life reveals a medieval dispute over worship, land and authority as Dartmouth’s residents sought a church nearer the water…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Davington Priory
Kent
Davington Priory preserves an unusually continuous monastic landscape where a Benedictine nunnery’s Norman nave (the main western space where the c…
- Near Faversham
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Day House Lane Stone Circle
Wiltshire
The last survivor of at least seven stone circles once raised south of Swindon, its five buried sarsens are the only physical evidence left for a l…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Deeping St James Priory
Lincolnshire
A small Benedictine cell whose parish church still stands as Grade I listed, though every trace of the monastic buildings themselves has vanished.
- Near Deeping St James
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Denbigh Friary
Denbighshire
A Carmelite friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them, whose walls survived Henry VIII's closure of…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derby Blackfriars
Derbyshire
A Dominican priory, a monastery headed by a prior, patronised by kings for three centuries now lies beneath a Derby nightclub, its cellars said to…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derrynaflan Church
County Tipperary
An early-medieval island monastery, buried in a Tipperary bog for over a thousand years, that gave up one of Ireland's finest hoards of gold and si…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Devenish Island
County Fermanagh
At its peak this remote lough island held as many as 1,500 monastic scholars, and its round tower, carved crosses and Viking-era history still stan…
- Near Enniskillen
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Devil's Arrows
North Yorkshire
The Devil’s Arrows are among Britain’s tallest standing stones and an exceptional lowland Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Devil's Quoits
Oxfordshire
A Late Neolithic henge (a prehistoric (from the era before writing arrived in these islands) earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rat…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dieulacres Abbey
Staffordshire
A Cistercian monastery founded by Ranulf, Earl of Chester at Poulton and moved near Leek in 1214.
- Near Leek
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dísert Óengusa
county-limerick
A 20-metre round tower and a ruined church mark a small religious settlement whose story reaches from an early founder tradition to restoration in…
- Near Limerick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dodford Priory
Worcestershire
A modest Augustinian house so reduced by 1464 that a single canon remained, later reborn as a Chartist land colony for working-class smallholders.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Doll Tor
Derbyshire
A small ring of six stones on Stanton Moor doubled, over generations, into a burial ground holding cremated adults and children alongside bronze fr…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dominican Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
One of the earliest Dominican houses established in England, founded within a few years of the order's first arrival on English soil: though nothin…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Donegal Abbey
County Donegal
A Franciscan foundation of the O'Donnell rulers, destroyed in 1601 but whose friars later created the Annals of the Four Masters.
- Near Donegal
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Donnington Friary
Berkshire
At its 1538 suppression the last two friars here are recorded as having relabelled their own order, quite possibly to help secure their pensions.
- Near Donnington
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dorchester Abbey
Oxfordshire
A parish church built as a Norman abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) on the site of a Saxon cathedral, its rich 1330 sanctuary and Jesse…
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Carmelite Friary
Cheshire
Although no buildings survive, Chester’s Carmelite friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind wa…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Grey Friary
Cheshire
A house of Franciscan friars once stood within Chester's walls, part of the network of urban friaries that set the mendicant orders apart from the…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chibburn Preceptory
Northumberland
Chibburn Preceptory preserves the remains of a Hospitaller house whose medieval courtyard, defensive moat, and later reuse chart major changes in N…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chippenham Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A religious house that endured from 1184 to 1540, spanning the entire era of the crusading military orders' presence in England before falling to H…
- Near Chippenham
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Sacred place
Chithurst Buddhist Monastery
West Sussex
The first branch monastery of Wat Pah Pong established outside Thailand, founded in a West Sussex hamlet in 1979.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cholsey Abbey
Oxfordshire
An Anglo-Saxon monastery founded between 993 and 997 by King Æthelred.
- Near Cholsey
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chudleigh Abbey
Devon
Chudleigh Abbey records a short but distinctive chapter in the long post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) journey…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church Island (Lough Currane)
County Kerry
Set into a block of sandstone in the ruined church on Church Island is a 12th-century engraving of a musician playing a bowed lyre, one of the more…
- Near Waterville
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Mary and St Petroc, Bodmin
Cornwall
A former medieval monastic church in Bodmin whose modern Catholic community restored the Lateran canons to Cornwall after more than three centuries.
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cockerham Priory
Lancashire
Cockerham Priory represents a small Lancashire cell of Leicester Abbey, recording the extension of Augustinian canons from St Mary de Pratis into t…
- Near Cockerham
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Coffin Stone
Kent
The Coffin Stone is a striking Medway megalith whose possible long barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, origin remains unresolved after excavation s…
- Near Aylesford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Colchester Crutched Friary
Essex
Colchester Crutched Friary is a lost medieval house known through its foundation, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Colchester Greyfriars
Essex
Colchester Greyfriars was a Franciscan house whose recorded church, hall and service buildings reveal a substantial friary (the base of a mendicant…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Combwell Priory
Kent
Combwell Priory records a rare institutional change from Premonstratensian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) to Augustinian priory, fol…
- Near Goudhurst
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Craddock Moor stone circle
Cornwall
Sixteen fallen stones and a single possible stump, all so overgrown that the circle ranks among the harder monuments to locate on Bodmin Moor, make…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cranborne Priory
Dorset
Cranborne Priory preserves a major thousand-year religious foundation in Dorset, whose surviving priory church combines Norman fabric, medieval pai…
- Near Cranborne
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derry, Ballyphilip
County Down
Derry’s two shale-built church ruins preserve early Christian worship, layered buildings and a cemetery whose men, women and children complicate a…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derrynane Abbey
County Kerry
Three roofless stone buildings stand overgrown on Abbey Island, a tidal islet off the coast of Derrynane in County Kerry, reachable on foot across…
- Near Caherdaniel
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derryvella
County Tipperary
A circular earthwork in Tipperary bogland carries two rival identities: one of the oldest monastic foundations in Ireland, its true name still disp…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dodnash Priory
Suffolk
Its charters are thought to hold the first known references to Flatford Mill. Wolsey dissolved the house in 1525 and spent its endowment on college…
- Near Bentley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dorchester Friary
Dorset
Dorchester Friary was a substantial Franciscan community beside the River Frome, shaped by royal, episcopal and local patronage before its 1538 sup…
- Near Dorchester
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