Sacred place · Medieval
Glasney College
Cornwall
Glasney College was medieval Cornwall's leading clerical and literary institution, and its destruction severed a major formal base for Cornish-lang…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 6 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glastonbury Abbey
Somerset
Monks dug up King Arthur here in 1191, seven years after a fire destroyed the abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, and pilgrim numbers collapsed.…
- Near Glastonbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glendalough
County Wicklow
A single monastic settlement produced two cathedrals' worth of ruins, a 30-metre round tower, and a saint's cave-retreat, all set between two glaci…
- Near Glendalough
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glenluce Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Glenluce Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation in Galloway whose post-Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monasteries) seizure, Ken…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Glenquicken stone circle
Dumfries and Galloway
At the centre of an oval ring of 29 stones, two miles east of Creetown in Dumfries and Galloway, a single tall pillar stands upright. This arrangem…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glenstal Abbey
County Limerick
A castle built new in the 1830s to look medieval later became a working Benedictine monastery whose monks charted commercial chant albums and sang…
- Near Murroe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gloucester Cathedral
Gloucestershire
Its cloisters hold the earliest fan vaulting raised anywhere in England, built on wealth that pilgrims brought to the shrine of a murdered king.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Goldcliff Priory
Newport
A Benedictine house whose monks wore white, not black, and whose farmland foundations still trace a 37-metre range beside a double-banked earthwork…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gorton Monastery
Greater Manchester
Gorton Monastery is Edward Welby Pugin’s major Gothic Revival friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeople, church, saved from derelictio…
- Near Gorton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grace Dieu Abbey, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
Grace Dieu was the last Cistercian foundation in Wales: a poor, repeatedly displaced abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) whose attacks, royal ti…
- Near Dingestow
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grange Abbey
County Dublin
The modest ruin preserves how the monastic farm of All Hallows served an estate community, then became a site of repeated conservation and archaeol…
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grangefertagh
County Kilkenny
Grangefertagh layers a sixth-century foundation, a 31-metre round tower and a later Augustinian church around one of Kilkenny’s most unusual mediev…
- Near Johnstown
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Granny Kempock Stone
Inverclyde
A weathered mica-schist pillar above a shopping street carries a rare double legacy: a supposed Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools f…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Limber Preceptory, Limber Magna
Lincolnshire
A quiet Lincolnshire farm site passed in turn through Cistercian, Templar and Hospitaller hands before ending as a Pelham family holding: three cen…
- Near Great Limber
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Limber Priory, Limber Magna
Lincolnshire
A Lincolnshire manor and church handed by charter to a Norman abbey, then sold on two centuries later to a Coventry priory: its status as priory or…
- Near Great Limber
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Malvern Priory
Worcestershire
Its 15th-century stained glass forms the largest surviving display of its kind in England, saved partly through the patronage of a man who had help…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Wilbraham Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A working parish church still carries a hidden Templar tombstone beneath its tower and a Templar cross on its outer wall, physical survivals of a p…
- Near Great Wilbraham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Yarmouth Grey Friary
Norfolk
Great Yarmouth Grey Friary preserves Grade I fragments of a Franciscan house founded around 1226, whose covered walkway survived through later reus…
- Near Great Yarmouth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greenfield Priory
Lincolnshire
Two generations of the Barons Welles were buried here, while surviving bishops' records lay bare a small nunnery repeatedly failing to keep its own…
- Near Aby
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Greensted Church
Essex
Greensted Church retains rare oak-wall construction from the late Anglo-Saxon or early Norman period, making it an exceptional survivor in debates…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gresley Priory
Derbyshire
A small Augustinian house so thinly staffed it once had only four canons, yet its church survived the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the mona…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Grey Croft stone circle
Cumbria
Ten upright stones stand today only because a 1949 dig found and re-set nine of them after a farmer toppled and buried the circle in 1820.
- Near Keswick
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars Church, Reading
Berkshire
A church that has been a friary, a town hall, a poorhouse, a house of correction and a jail before ever returning to worship: the only Franciscan c…
- Near Reading
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Bedford
Bedfordshire
Two rival medieval sources credit different founders: one a noblewoman, one a knight: and its church became the resting place of a medieval baron o…
- Near Bedford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Beverley
East Riding of Yorkshire
A Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind walls) rebuilt on a knight's money after…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Canterbury
Kent
England’s first Franciscan friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) preserves rare traces of medi…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Coventry
West Midlands
A single medieval spire still rises where an entire Franciscan priory once stood: the only fragment to survive dissolution, a Victorian rebuilding,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Leicester
Leicestershire
A car park in Leicester concealed an undisturbed medieval church floor for centuries: including the grave of a king whose bones were long rumoured,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
A single friary building carried four wholly different institutions across seven centuries: friary, grammar school, Mechanics' Institute, and count…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, London
City of London
A friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among the towns instead of apart from them) church so richly endowed by queens that it became…
- Near City of London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
Greyfriars reveals medieval Nottingham’s lost Franciscan presence: a church rebuilt in stone for nearly a century, now erased beneath Broadmarsh.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Stamford
Lincolnshire
A royal cortège carrying the exhumed Duke of York rested here in 1476, and the friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the s…
- Near Stamford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Winchelsea
East Sussex
One of England's best-preserved Franciscan friary, a religious house for a preaching order, stands beside a Gothic country house raised four centur…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grovebury Priory
Bedfordshire
One of only four English houses of the Order of Fontevrault, and the only one entirely destroyed by a sand quarry: rescued from oblivion by a decad…
- Near Leighton Buzzard
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Grubstones
West Yorkshire
Someone built an orgone accumulator into it in the twentieth century: a mound meant to collect a life force that does not exist.
- Near Ilkley
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Guildford Black Friary
Surrey
The graves of plague victims, buried together in communal pits beneath the choir, are among the clearest human traces excavation found only a metre…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hagnaby Abbey
Lincolnshire
A widow's grief founded it, Becket's memory named it, and eight decades of dependency ended in full abbey status: a rare, well-documented Premonstr…
- Near Hagnaby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hailes Abbey
Gloucestershire
A phial said to hold Christ's blood turned this Cistercian house into a major pilgrimage site: its exposure as a fake later helped seal the abbey (…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Halesowen Abbey
West Midlands
Its manorial court rolls survive in unusual depth, recording three centuries of tenants openly defying a monastic landlord: a rare surviving voice…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Haltadans
Shetland Islands
Thirty-eight stones once ringed this patch of ground on Fetlar, Shetland; twenty-two of them still stand fixed in the soil, describing a circle ele…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haltemprice Priory
East Riding of Yorkshire
A powerful baron moved an entire monastery two miles across country to outwit English inheritance law, and its farmhouse successor still stands, re…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hardham Priory
West Sussex
A house of Black Canons in the water meadows of the Arun, whose refectory: the monks' dining hall: survives because somebody turned it into a farmh…
- Near Hardham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Harold's Stones
monmouthshire
Three puddingstone monoliths in a row eleven metres long, raised in the Bronze Age: the era of metalworking from about 2500 to 800 BC: and aligned…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Harrold Priory
Bedfordshire
A small nunnery whose own chartulary preserves an unusually candid account of medieval convent life, ending in a disputed 1535 visitation letter al…
- Near Harrold
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hartland Abbey
Devon
Hartland Abbey carries the history of an Augustinian foundation established in the twelfth century through dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hartlepool Abbey
County Durham
A double monastery of monks and nuns led by two of early Northumbria's most influential abbesses, its cemetery is the most thoroughly excavated of…
- Near Hartlepool
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hastings Priory
East Sussex
One of the few English monasteries driven from its home not by dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) or fire but by th…
- Near Hastings
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hatfield Peverel Priory
Essex
Hatfield Peverel Priory links a pre-Conquest religious foundation, a Benedictine cell of St Albans and a long post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closur…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haugham Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny Norman-endowed cell whose three-century fate was decided by war, not by monks: passed between king, bishop and rival religious house before…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haughmond Abbey
Shropshire
A ruined Augustinian monastery near Shrewsbury, probably of the early twelfth century and long tied to the FitzAlans.
- Near Shrewsbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haverfordwest Priory
Pembrokeshire
A religious house on the banks of the Western Cleddau, its setting shaped by the river.
- Near Haverfordwest
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haverholme Priory
Lincolnshire
Haverholme Priory preserves the layered story of a Gilbertine double monastery, later Gothic country house and listed ruin, connecting medieval rel…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Hawk Stone
Oxfordshire
A Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4000–2500 BC) monolith whose polished hollow records centuries of hopeful hands, and whos…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hawkesyard Priory
Staffordshire
A Dominican house under a prior, built between 1896 and 1914 off Armitage Lane, with its church of St Thomas.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hazleton Abbey
Gloucestershire
A twelfth-century Cistercian foundation so troubled by water shortage that the monks abandoned it for Tetbury within years, leaving only a barn beh…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Healaugh Park Priory
North Yorkshire
A working farmhouse near Tadcaster still carries the bones of an Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, inside its walls, its descent trac…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Heart of Neolithic Orkney
Orkney Islands
The Orkney World Heritage group is made up of monuments from the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC, whose remains illuminate the islands’ cha…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Heathery Burn Cave
County Durham
A single cave near Stanhope yielded over two hundred Late Bronze Age objects: gold, bronze, bone and pottery together: among the richest hoards of…
- Near Stanhope
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Heelstone Ditch
Wiltshire
A narrow, steep-sided trench encircling the Heel Stone whose own relationship to that famous sarsen is still unresolved: did the ditch follow the s…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hereford Cathedral
Herefordshire
Its library holds the largest surviving collection of chained books in the world, alongside the Mappa Mundi, a circa-1300 map of the known world dr…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hexham Abbey
Northumberland
Hexham Abbey is a 1,300-year religious site where Wilfrid’s Roman-material Saxon crypt survives beneath a later Augustinian church that became Hexh…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Heynings Priory
Lincolnshire
Its last prioress surrendered a house so poor from its very founding that the exact site of its buildings has since been lost, leaving only a farm…
- Near Knaith
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hickling Priory
Norfolk
Hickling Priory was a wealthy Augustinian house with holdings across thirty-two Norfolk parishes, whose collapse after plague and dissolution (Henr…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Hill of Fiddes stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Reduced from a full stone circle to two boundary stones in a field wall, the site nonetheless carries the same legal protection as much larger monu…
- Near Ellon
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hinckley Priory
Leicestershire
A tiny alien priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose loyalty to a Norman abbey, a monastic house under the rule of an abbot, made it a casualty o…
- Near Hinckley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hinton Priory
Somerset
A Carthusian house founded because the monks found their first site insufficiently solitary: and named God's Place.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hitchin Priory
Hertfordshire
A Palladian-fronted hotel wraps around a genuine medieval cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) garth, its blocked m…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Hoarstones
Shropshire
A stone circle in the parish of Chirbury with Brompton, known also as Hoar Stone Circle.
- Near Shelve
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holmcultram Abbey
Cumbria
Founded on land that belonged to Scotland before England reclaimed it, the abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) was raided by Robe…
- Near Abbeytown
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Sepulchre Priory, Thetford
Norfolk
Holy Sepulchre Priory preserves the only surviving English remains of a Canons of the Holy Sepulchre priory, linking a fourteenth-century Thetford…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Abbey, Lough Key
County Roscommon
A canon-scribed chronicle of Irish history and the tomb behind one of Connacht's best-known tragic love stories both survive on this one small lake…
- Near Boyle
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Holy Trinity Church, Colchester
Essex
Holy Trinity Church is Colchester’s oldest standing building and its only surviving Anglo-Saxon structure, preserving a rare Saxon tower, later med…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Church, Cork
County Cork
A single-parish campaign of ordinary Corkonians, spread across sixty years and a famine, finally raised a tapering Gothic spire on marshy quayside…
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Church, Westbury on Trym
Bristol
Its 10th-century Benedictine community, briefly reformed by Bishop Oswald, was the seed from which Ramsey Abbey grew after Oswald relocated its mon…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Priory
City of London
A queen's own foundation that grew powerful enough for its prior to sit as an Alderman of London, yet vanished so completely that only a few pointe…
- Near London
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Well, Malvern
Worcestershire
Believed to be the site of the world's oldest commercial water-bottling operation, with production recorded here since 1622 and revived again in 2009.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holyrood Abbey
City of Edinburgh
Holyrood Abbey is Edinburgh's ruined royal abbey, founded by David I and central to Scottish parliaments, coronations and palace life before a cata…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hope Church of All Saints
Kent
This Romney Marsh church ruin offers physical evidence of a lost medieval parish and possible deserted village, now interpreted through a sculpture…
- Near New Romney
More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gokewell Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny Cistercian community of nuns that never grew beyond a handful of women, remembered chiefly through a bishop's blunt verdict: poor in means,…
- Near Broughton
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Goodaver stone circle
Cornwall
Goodaver's reconstructed ring remains a major Bodmin Moor stone circle, where its altered standing stones are themselves part of the record of twen…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grafton Preceptory
Warwickshire
The village is called Temple Grafton because of a clerical error under Henry VIII. The Templars were never here; the Hospitallers had been for thre…
- Near Temple Grafton
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Grannie stone
North Ayrshire
The Grannie Stone is an enduring Irvine river landmark whose uncertain origin: glacial erratic or last stone-circle survivor: reveals how folklore,…
- Near Irvine
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Bricett Priory
Suffolk
Its head was summoned to Westminster in 1346 with the other alien priors, on pain of forfeiting the house, its lands and its goods.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Connell Priory
County Kildare
Great Connell was a powerful Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, of the Pale, founded from Wales and later dismantled for Newbridge bar…
- Near Newbridge
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Yarmouth Carmelite Friary
Norfolk
Great Yarmouth Carmelite Friary represents the town’s medieval White Friars community, whose 1276 foundation, 1509 fire and 1538 suppression are no…
- Near Great Yarmouth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greenham Preceptory
Berkshire
A working house of the crusading Knights Hospitaller stood here for over three centuries, yet today not one stone of it can be pointed to.
- Near Greenham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grey Abbey, Kildare
County Kildare
Grey Abbey joins a 1260 Franciscan foundation to the likely manuscript source of the Kildare poems, giving its ruined fabric a rare literary signif…
- Near Kildare
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Grey Wethers
Devon
Grey Wethers is an unusually well-defined pair of prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) stone circles on Dartmoor, with surviving l…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Of Gloucester's three medieval friaries, only Greyfriars kept a standing church above ground - the Berkeleys' Perpendicular Gothic rebuild of about…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, King's Lynn
Norfolk
Greyfriars Tower is one of only three surviving Franciscan monastic towers in England, retained after the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the…
- Near King’s Lynn
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Sacred place · Medieval
GreyFriars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Charles I was held prisoner by the Scots in the mansion built out of the Franciscans' own stone. The whole thing came down to make way for Grey Str…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Shrewsbury
Shropshire
A house of friars where Owen de la Pole, the last Prince of Powys, was buried alongside his daughters.
- Near Shrewsbury
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Hampton Down Stone Circle
Dorset
Hampton Down’s reconstructed stone circle offers a rare case study in how excavation corrected centuries of disturbance and revealed a much smaller…
- Near Portesham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hatfield Regis Priory
Essex
Hatfield Regis Priory records an English Benedictine house negotiating dependence on a Breton mother abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot), aristo…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Haughey's Fort
Armagh
Haughey's Fort is a large late Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC) hilltop enclosure near Armagh, whose concentric ditches preserve an earlier ceremon…
- Near Armagh
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Heel Stone
Wiltshire
A single sarsen block leaning nearly 27 degrees from vertical, with as much of its bulk buried below ground as most people ever see standing above it.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Helenstowe Nunnery
Oxfordshire
Tradition ties it to a rare paired arrangement: a sister's nunnery and her brother's abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) standing on opposite hi…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hempton Priory
Norfolk
Hempton Priory was an Augustinian hospital-priory near Fakenham, where surviving earthworks record a community that combined care, fairs and estate…
- Near Fakenham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hogshaw Nunnery
Buckinghamshire
A modest Buckinghamshire nunnery that, by the 15th century, had been recast as a commandery bearing the name of the Knights Templar.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Holywell Priory
Greater London
Holywell Priory was a long-lived Augustinian house of women in Shoreditch whose former precinct later hosted The Theatre, the playhouse whose timbe…
- Near Shoreditch
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