Sacred place · Medieval
Dore Abbey
Herefordshire
A Cistercian church built to rival the great abbeys of France now survives folded inside a small parish church, its 13th-century transepts and colu…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 5 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dornoch Cathedral
Highland
Burned by feuding clansmen in 1570 and rebuilt on a narrower plan in the 1830s, it still holds the graves of earls, dukes and the bishop-saint who…
- Near Dornoch
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dover Priory
Kent
Dover Priory was a major Benedictine house whose church, scriptorium and hospitality shaped medieval Dover; its surviving refectory (the monks' din…
- Near Dover
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dromiskin Monastery
County Louth
A round tower, high cross and ruined church survive together on one small site: rare continuity for a monastery plundered by Vikings and Irish raid…
- Near Dromiskin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Drove Cottage Henge
Somerset
One of only about 80 henges in England: an earthwork, a bank and ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, whose ditch lies inside its bank, so…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Drumbo round tower
County Down
Drumbo round tower preserves a rare early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) lookout and monastic remnant, with tim…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Drumtroddan standing stones
Dumfries and Galloway
Of the three stones that once formed the alignment at Drumtroddan, only one still stands. The others lie fallen on the ground, set in a line runnin…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Duddo Five Stones
Northumberland
Duddo Five Stones is a weathered Northumberland stone circle whose surviving pink sandstone pillars and recovered sockets reveal a larger original…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dudley Priory
West Midlands
A Cluniac house whose 1939 excavation left medieval floor tiles exposed at ground level in a public park, still walked past daily.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Duiske Abbey
County Kilkenny
Duiske Abbey is one of Ireland's greatest Cistercian churches, restored as Graiguenamanagh's parish church while retaining medieval stonework, tile…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Duloe stone circle
Cornwall
Duloe stone circle is an unusual oval of eight white quartzite stones, moved and partly damaged in 1861 but still defining a distinctive Cornish pr…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunblane Cathedral
Stirling
A cathedral whose nave stood roofless for nearly three centuries: and which holds the finest medieval woodwork in Scotland after King's College, Ab…
- Near Dunblane
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunbrody Abbey
County Wexford
One of the longest church buildings in medieval Ireland at 59 metres, its bell tower was built by threading new piers alongside the old transept (t…
- Near New Ross
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dundrennan Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Dundrennan Abbey is a remarkably legible Cistercian ruin whose disciplined Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) architecture…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunkeld Cathedral
Perth and Kinross
A cathedral begun in 1260 and finished in 1501, standing on a Columban monastery whose reused red sandstone still shows as a streak across the east…
- Near Dunkeld
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunmore Abbey
County Galway
A community said to trace back to a saint's 5th-century mission became an Augustinian friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rathe…
- Near Tuam
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dunnideer stone circle
Aberdeenshire
One of more than seventy recumbent stone circles once raised across lowland Aberdeenshire, its three surviving stones stand at the foot of a hillto…
- Near Insch
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunstable Friary
Bedfordshire
A rare medieval jewel: a gold and enamel swan badge: came out of the ground here, one of the most celebrated small finds ever recovered from an Eng…
- Near Dunstable
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunstable Priory
Bedfordshire
In 1533 the Lady Chapel of this Augustinian priory hosted the ruling that ended Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a quiet Bedfordshire…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dunster Priory
Somerset
Monks and parishioners shared one church and quarrelled over it, so a carved screen was built across the middle to divide the building in two.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dupath Well
Cornwall
Dupath Well is a nearly intact late-medieval holy well house where a granite chapel-like structure protects a spring once associated with healing.
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Dureford Abbey
Hampshire
A monastery whose four centuries were marked less by prayerful calm than by lightning strikes, armed invasions and a patron who murdered his own ab…
- Near Rogate
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Durham Priory
County Durham
One of the great Benedictine houses of northern England, Durham Priory guarded the shrine of Saint Cuthbert and grew wealthy enough to rival the Bi…
- Near Durham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Durrow Abbey
County Offaly
A monastery that produced one of the earliest fully decorated Gospel books and recorded Europe's only known eyewitness sighting of the 1054 supernova.
- Near Tullamore
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Sacred place · Medieval
Duxford Chapel
Cambridgeshire
A lone medieval chapel that outlived the hospital it served, then spent two centuries as a barn before restoration saved it.
- Near Whittlesford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Easby Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its finest woodwork was carried off to Richmond at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s), yet six generations of o…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Easebourne Priory
West Sussex
Founded before 1238 for a prioress and ten canonesses. Its claustral remains are now inside a Grade I listed house.
- Near Easebourne
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Easter Aquhorthies stone circle
Aberdeenshire
One of Scotland's best-preserved recumbent stone circles, and the only one where every stone still stands exactly where its Bronze Age (roughly 250…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Easthill stone circle
Dumfries and Galloway
Easthill's ring is short of a stone. Eight survive in an oval roughly three and three-quarter miles south-west of Dumfries, and a ninth is thought…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ecclesfield Priory
South Yorkshire
A Yorkshire monastic chapel survived the closure of the monasteries disguised as a farmhouse, with its medieval fabric still intact behind a sevent…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Edington Priory
Wiltshire
A bishop's private chantry for his family's souls grew within seven years into a full monastic house, and its church still stands complete and in d…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Egglestone Abbey
County Durham
A White Canons' house so poor it struggled to keep even twelve monks, yet its rebuilt church still stands on the Tees bank a century after its firs…
- Near Barnard Castle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Elder Well
Staffordshire
A spring in a metre-square sandstone box, dressed yearly with flowers and branches, and reckoned a cure for the eyes since Robert Plot listed it.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ellerton Priory (Swaledale)
North Yorkshire
Ellerton Priory is a rare Swaledale Cistercian-nuns’ site whose uncertain foundation, 1342 Scottish destruction, revealing 1536 dissolution (Henry…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Elstow Abbey
Bedfordshire
A Norman nunnery founded by a niece of William the Conqueror whose abbesses fought lawsuits, defied bishops, and left a parish church built from th…
- Near Elstow
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Elva Plain Stone Circle
Cumbria
One of only five true Cumbrian circles, its wide open ring on Elva Hill may once have tracked the midwinter sunset over the fells to the southwest.
- Near Millom
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ely Cathedral
Cambridgeshire
A Norman crossing tower collapsed in 1322 and was replaced not with another square tower but with a unique timber-and-stone octagon, still held up…
- Near Ely
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ennis Friary
County Clare
Ennis Friary is a National Monument whose Franciscan ruins preserve six centuries of O'Brien patronage, Gaelic education, Reformation (the sixteent…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Errew Abbey
County Mayo
A monastery said to have drawn 1,400 students from across Europe once stood on this Lough Conn peninsula, and its story survives chiefly through th…
- Near Ballinrobe
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Esker Friary
County Galway
Four centuries of continuous religious life under one roof: Dominican novitiate, diocesan seminary, then Redemptorist monastery: ending only in 2022.
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Everdon Priory
Northamptonshire
Its monks were formally investigated by the Crown in 1329 for turning justice into profit, and the priory, a monastery run by a prior, ended up own…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Evesham Abbey
Worcestershire
Simon de Montfort, the baron whose death reshaped England's parliamentary history, lies buried near the high altar of a Benedictine house that was…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Evesham Bell Tower
Worcestershire
The only fragment of Evesham Abbey the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) left wholly intact, saved from demolition…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ewenny Priory
Vale of Glamorgan
Called the most complete and impressive Norman ecclesiastical building in Glamorgan: and defended like a castle, on the site its founder first mean…
- Near Ewenny
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Cathedral
Devon
Exeter Cathedral is a thousand-year religious and architectural landmark, renowned for its Roman-to-Gothic history, medieval vaulting, misericords,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Greyfriars
Devon
Exeter Greyfriars documents a Franciscan community present in the city from before 1240 until the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monaster…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Eye Priory
Suffolk
Excavation in 1926 showed the buildings here were put up as a deliberate copy of the mother house in Normandy. A ninth-century seal-die of Bishop A…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Eynsham Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Thames-side abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) founded by royal licence in 1005, briefly annexed to a Lincolnshire house before return…
- Near Eynsham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fair Oak Lodge
Hampshire
A country house has been renamed, rebuilt, converted to a convent and finally turned into a school, while an unproven local tradition ties the grou…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Falkner's Circle
Wiltshire
Reduced to a single leaning sarsen in a hedge, it is the ghost of a twelve-stone ring whose earthfast neighbours built Avebury itself.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Farewell Priory
Staffordshire
Founded for male hermits and then given away to a community of women by the same bishop who had just endowed it.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Felley Priory
Nottinghamshire
Felley turns a tiny Augustinian community into a living landscape: monastic origins underlie the house and gardens visitors see today.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ferrybridge Henge
West Yorkshire
An Iron Age sword scabbard and a Roman coin were found in the inner ditch: the place appears to have been kept as a shrine for two thousand years a…
- Near Ferrybridge
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Figsbury Ring
Wiltshire
A monument that has resisted classification for a century: what looks like an Iron Age hillfort conceals an inner ditch many now read as the mark o…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Finchale Priory
County Durham
A Grade I listed Benedictine priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: by the River Wear, developed from the hermitage of St Godr…
- Near Durham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fineshade Priory
Northamptonshire
A single stable block is all that survives of a monastic site rebuilt as a country house, then demolished twice more, most recently in 1956.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Fir Clump Stone Circle
Wiltshire
One of at least seven prehistoric circles reported south of Swindon, and the only one confirmed as a true double ring: destroyed twice over, by nin…
- Easy path
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Crossing or structure · Prehistoric
Flag Fen
Cambridgeshire
More than 60,000 timbers, driven into the peat to carry a kilometre-long causeway across open water, with weapons and jewellery deliberately broken…
- Near Peterborough
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Flanesford Priory
Herefordshire
A Grade I listed monastic refectory: the monks' dining hall: that outlived its priory: a monastery headed by a prior: by farming, then by holiday l…
- Near Goodrich
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Flaxley Abbey
Gloucestershire
A Cistercian house founded, tradition holds, on the very spot its founder's father was killed hunting: and one of the rare abbeys that lived on as…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Flitcham Priory
Norfolk
Flitcham Priory records a medieval religious foundation in Norfolk associated with Sir Robert III Aguillon, preserving a named link between local l…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Forde Abbey
Dorset
Forde Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation transformed after 1539 into a privately owned house, retaining major monastic rooms, an important gar…
- Near Thorncombe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fore Abbey
County Westmeath
One of the largest surviving groups of Benedictine ruins in Ireland grew directly out of a 7th-century Gaelic monastery whose founder is still cred…
- Near Mullingar
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fountains Abbey
North Yorkshire
Fountains Abbey grew from an expelled group of York monks into England’s richest Cistercian house; its ruins, water management and later parkland m…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Lichfield
Staffordshire
A Grey Friars' house given oaks by two kings and dissolved in 1538: its only standing fabric now attached to the city library.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Southampton
Hampshire
The friars left almost nothing standing of their church, yet the pipe network they built to bring fresh water into the town still marks the ground…
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Frithelstock Priory
Devon
Frithelstock Priory preserves the history of an Augustinian foundation, its Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s)-era…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Furness Abbey
Cumbria
For three centuries this was the second-richest Cistercian house in England after Fountains, ruling Man and its bishops from a red sandstone valley…
- Near Barrow-in-Furness
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gallen Abbey
County Offaly
A monastery twice devastated by Munster kings and twice rebuilt, its surviving grave slabs span four centuries, and ownership passed from an Irish…
- Near Ferbane
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Gamelands stone circle
Cumbria
Some forty fallen pink granite stones still trace a full oval on the fellside, one of the largest stone circles in Cumbria despite two centuries of…
- Near Kendal
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Garendon Abbey
Leicestershire
A Georgian mansion was built directly across the footprint of the vanished abbey church, its drains reusing the monks' own sewer: two buildings, fo…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Gatton Park
Surrey
Ten flagstones quarried near Thurso carry 2,000 years of quotation across a park shaped by Capability Brown: a millennium monument standing inside…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gilling Abbey
North Yorkshire
A monastery founded as blood-price for a murdered king: the weregild for Oswine of Deira paid not in silver but in stone and prayer.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Girdle Stanes
Dumfries and Galloway
Twenty-six standing stones curve in a crescent above the bank of the White Esk near Eskdalemuir, in Dumfries and Galloway. The gap in the ring is n…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gisborough Priory
North Yorkshire
Gisborough Priory was a wealthy Augustinian foundation rebuilt after catastrophic fire and then dismantled at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glanworth Abbey
County Cork
A Dominican priory whose true founding date is disputed: left out of the order's own 1300 catalogue, which points to an origin nearer 1475 than the…
- Near Fermoy
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Glasgow Cathedral
Glasgow City
One of only two medieval Scottish cathedrals: alongside St Magnus in Orkney: to survive the Reformation (the sixteenth-century suppression of monas…
- Near Gloucester
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
East Bergholt Abbey
Suffolk
The nuns baked their own bread, brewed their own beer, kept bees and showed at local agricultural shows: and paid the bills by making vestments.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Eastminster
Greater London
Eastminster was a short-lived Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) founded by Edward III beside the Tower of London, whose exca…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ellerton Priory (Spalding Moor)
East Riding of Yorkshire
Ellerton Priory is a scheduled remnant of the Gilbertine order, England’s only medieval monastic order founded for both men and women.
- Near Ellerton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Elsham Priory
Lincolnshire
Elsham’s fishpond is a fragile witness: the lone physical trace of a monastery founded by Beatrice d’Amundeville and dissolved in 1536.
- Near Elsham
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Emblance Downs stone circles
Cornwall
A closely spaced pair of ruined Bodmin Moor stone circles, preserving an unusual double-monument arrangement beside other prehistoric (before any w…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Blackfriars
Devon
Exeter Blackfriars marks the former Dominican presence in the city centre and carries evidence of elite medieval burial before the priory: a religi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Faringdon Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Cistercian monastery at Wyke, just north of the town, on a royal manor.
- Near Faringdon
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Sacred place · Medieval
Farmcote Grange
Gloucestershire
Farmcote Grange's only firmly established fact is one link: this Gloucestershire farm answered to the great abbey (a self-governing monastery, its…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Faxfleet Preceptory
East Riding of Yorkshire
One of Yorkshire's wealthiest Templar houses, founded by a ransomed Crusader lord and erased so completely that only a buried field and a farm name…
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Sacred place
Feltham Priory
cheshire
A community that has moved six times in a century and a half: Feltham, Twickenham, West Malling, Milford Haven, Talacre and finally Chester: and ch…
- Near Chester
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Fernacre
Cornwall
One of Cornwall's largest stone circles, set in a landscape of prehistoric (from the era before writing arrived in these islands) settlement and la…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Flagstones Enclosure
Dorset
Flagstones is a late Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4000–2500 BC) interrupted-ditch enclosure near Dorchester, with burial…
- Near Dorchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Flixton Priory
Suffolk
A nunnery under a prioress following the Augustinian rule, in the north of the county.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Folkestone Priory
Kent
Folkestone Priory connects a possibly first English nunnery, founded by Saint Eanswith in the 640s, with a later Benedictine house whose repeated r…
- Near Canterbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fordham Priory
Cambridgeshire
A Georgian manor house now stands on the footprint of a 300-year-old religious house, its Grade II listing the only formal recognition left of the…
- Near Fordham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Frampton Priory
Dorset
Frampton Priory records a Benedictine dependency of the Abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) of Saint-Étienne whose medieval site later be…
- Near Frampton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
Nothing survives above ground, yet for three centuries this was one of Winchester's working friaries: a house of preaching friars living among the…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Frating Abbey
Essex
Frating Abbey is not evidenced as an abbey: the name belongs to a nineteenth-century farmhouse and later cartographic tradition, not a documented m…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Freiston Priory
Lincolnshire
Freiston Priory was a Benedictine cell of Crowland Abbey, founded after a 1114 church gift and later developing into a priory before its 1539 Disso…
- Near Freiston
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Freughlough
County Tyrone
Freughlough’s Scheduled standing stone survives at the edge of a housing estate, bringing a protected prehistoric (from the era before writing arri…
- Near Cookstown
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Giant's Grave, Cumbria
Cumbria
Two standing stones at the foot of Black Combe carry rare prehistoric (before any written account of Britain existed) cup and ring carvings, one st…
- Near Penrith
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gillingham Friary
Dorset
Gillingham Friary is a sparsely recorded possible Dominican house in Dorset, whose uncertain identification is itself an important limit on what ca…
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