Sacred place · Prehistoric
Hordron Edge stone circle
Derbyshire
Only ten of a ring some believe once held 26 stones survive above Ladybower reservoir: three of them lying hidden and unnoticed until 1992.
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 7 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hore Abbey
County Tipperary
The last Cistercian house founded in Ireland before the monasteries closed under Henry VIII, Hore Abbey sits beside a ridge whose medieval cathedra…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hornby Priory
Lancashire
A small Premonstratensian cell answering to Croxton Abbey nearly 150 miles away, its founding credited across three generations of one family befor…
- Near Hornby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Horsley Priory
Gloucestershire
A tiny Norman-founded cell built for just a prior, a monk and a chaplain, traded between two mother houses and then erased from record before 1380…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hospital of St John the Baptist, High Wycombe
Buckinghamshire
A 12th-century almshouse chapel became, without ever moving site, the seedbed of a Royal Grammar School still teaching boys eight centuries later.
- Near High Wycombe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hoxne Priory
Suffolk
Built at what was held to be the place where Edmund, king of East Anglia, was martyred. The chapel came first, around 950, and a priory: a monaster…
- Near Hoxne
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hulne Priory
Northumberland
Hulne Priory is a rare Northumberland Carmelite foundation whose substantial ruins combine contemplative friary, a religious house for the order, l…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hulton Abbey
Staffordshire
A former monastery in Stoke-on-Trent, now protected by law for its archaeology.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Humberston Abbey
Lincolnshire
A rare case where a bishop's own 1422 testimony ties an English abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot)'s monks directly back to a name…
- Near Humberston
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hurley Priory
Berkshire
A Norman priory church still in parish use stands beside a working medieval dovecote, barn and inn: a rare case where almost every part of a monast…
- Near Hurley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hyde Abbey
Hampshire
A Winchester prison's foundation trenches once turned up stone coffins, a gilded crozier and the disturbed grave of England's most famous early kin…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Illauntannig Monastic Site
County Kerry
A cluster of beehive cells, oratories and a carved stone cross survives almost whole inside a drystone island wall: a rare complete early Christian…
- Near Dingle
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inchcolm Abbey
Fife
Inchcolm Abbey is Scotland’s most complete surviving monastic complex, preserving an Augustinian island community whose buildings also reveal the F…
- Near St Andrews
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inchmacnerin Abbey
County Roscommon
A monastery reputedly founded by Columba on its own island in Lough Key, later refounded as an Augustinian priory, a monastery headed by a prior an…
- Near Roscommon
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inishkeel
County Donegal
A monastery reachable only by a sandy tidal path once held the bell of its founding saint: now in the British Museum, an ocean's width from the rui…
- Near Glenties
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inishmaine Abbey
County Mayo
Refounded for an Augustinian community of nuns after 1223, on the site of a seventh-century monastic foundation, this Lough Mask ruin was later dis…
- Near Lough Mask
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inishmurray
County Sligo
A monastery founded by Saint Columba's own confessor, raided twice by Vikings, then resettled, farmed and finally evacuated entire in 1948: the isl…
- Near Sligo
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inislounaght Abbey
County Tipperary
Its dismantled stone still stands elsewhere: reused in Clonmel's Main Guard and in local mills: while the abbey (a religious community led by an ab…
- Near Clonmel
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Inschfield stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Only three stones survive from a ring that once spanned some 27 metres: a fragment of Aberdeenshire's rare recumbent stone circle tradition, now le…
- Near Insch
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Iona Nunnery
Argyll and Bute
The ruined church, cloister and domestic ranges of the Iona Nunnery stand in a walled precinct beside Baile Mor, the only village on the island of…
- Near Baile Mor
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ipswich Blackfriars
Suffolk
A Dominican house founded by Henry III in 1263 and dissolved in 1538, the second of three friaries in the town.
- Near Ipswich
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Isleham Priory Church
Cambridgeshire
A Norman monastic chapel of about 1100 survives almost untouched because it spent centuries disguised as a barn, not because anyone set out to pres…
- Near Isleham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ivychurch Priory
Wiltshire
A religious house whose ruined cloisters gave Sir Philip Sidney the setting to write much of his Arcadia, before nearly all of it was pulled down i…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ixworth Priory
Suffolk
The east range survives almost complete inside a house called Ixworth Abbey. Stone from the ruins went into Hengrave Hall in the early sixteenth ce…
- Near Ixworth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Jerpoint Abbey
County Kilkenny
Jerpoint Abbey is a richly carved Cistercian ruin whose cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) figures and tomb sculp…
- Near Thomastown
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Jervaulx Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its ruins were deliberately left unweeded and ivy-clad as a Picturesque garden feature, making Jervaulx the rare Cistercian ruin never stripped bar…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Keele Preceptory
Staffordshire
A Templar estate given by Henry II, seized on a papal bull in 1307, and finally handed to the Hospitallers in 1342.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kells Priory
County Kilkenny
Kells Priory is one of Ireland's largest medieval monuments, where defensive towers wrap an Augustinian precinct so completely that the religious h…
- Near Kells
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kepier Hospital
County Durham
A medieval Durham hospital founded for poor people, rebuilt beside the Wear and later dissolved, with its gatehouse and hospital landscape still su…
- Near Durham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kersey Priory
Suffolk
Founded as a hospital, converted into a monastery, and dissolved in 1443: nearly a century before the Dissolution: with the property handed to King…
- Near Kersey
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kerswell Priory
Devon
Kerswell Priory preserves a small medieval religious foundation whose disputed affiliation, alien-priory history, dissolution (Henry VIII's closure…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Keynsham Abbey
Somerset
An abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: endowed with 24,520 acres and quarried so thoroughly afterwards that in places the digging reached bedrock.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilchousland Chapel
Argyll and Bute
One of only a handful of Scottish chapels dedicated to St Constantine, a shadowy royal-saint whose cult is otherwise scarce in the historical record.
- Near Campbeltown
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilconnell Abbey
County Galway
A ruined Franciscan house whose church and eastern convent range survived into the twentieth century almost intact, even though the community that…
- Near Ballinasloe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilcooly Abbey
County Tipperary
Its chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) holds the effigy tomb of knight Piers Fitz Oge Butler, carved with ten apostles by t…
- Near Thurles
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilcrea Friary
County Cork
Kilcrea preserves an unusually complete Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind wa…
- Near Cork
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kildare Abbey
County Kildare
For centuries its abbess held a rank of honour acknowledged by every other abbess in Ireland, and its scribes and metalworkers produced manuscripts…
- Near Kildare
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kildermot Abbey
County Mayo
A ruined lakeside priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a larger monastery, whose recovered holy water fonts are…
- Near Ballinrobe
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killarney Franciscan Friary
County Kerry
A working Franciscan house barely 160 years old that has trained novices from Ireland, Britain, Germany, Holland, Sweden and Canada, and still carr…
- Near Killarney
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killeshin Church
County Laois
The doorway inscription names Diarmait Mac Murchada, the Leinster king whose later appeal to Anglo-Norman lords would reshape Ireland's history.
- Near Carlow
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Killin Stone Circle
Stirling
Six schist slabs in a flattened ring by Loch Tay, with three cupmarks ground into the top of the northernmost.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmacduagh monastery
County Galway
A cathedral seat reduced to seven scattered ruins in a single field, crowned by a round tower that leans further from true than almost any other in…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmalkedar
County Kerry
A hole pierces the east wall of the chancel (the part of a church around the altar) at Kilmalkedar, low and narrow. Local tradition gives it a name…
- Near Dingle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilree
County Kilkenny
Kilree preserves an early Christian enclosure, a distinctive round-tower foundation and a richly carved high cross, while local tradition and the a…
- Near Callan
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilve Chantry
Somerset
A chantry founded to pray for one man's soul, which became a barn, then a smugglers' store, and burned down in 1848 to hide the brandy.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilwinning Abbey
North Ayrshire
Kilwinning’s ruined monastery once held revenues from fourteen parishes, granges and baronial jurisdiction, leaving an unusually wide medieval impr…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kinalehin Friary
County Galway
Ireland's only Carthusian monastery once stood here, a solitary order that left almost no other trace on the island before Franciscans remade the s…
- Near Gort
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
King Arthur's Round Table
Cumbria
Despite its legendary name, this is a genuine Neolithic, the late Stone Age, henge, a bank and ditch enclosing a circular space, one half of a pair…
- Near Penrith
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
King's Langley Priory
Hertfordshire
A Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) founded on a king's battlefield vow and twin…
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Sacred place · Medieval
King's Mead Priory
Derbyshire
The only Benedictine nunnery in medieval Derbyshire, its prioresses fought off a rival abbot's control and a bailiff's threats to defend their inde…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsgate, Winchester
Hampshire
One of only two medieval gates left standing in Winchester, it carries a working parish church built into its own fabric: a gateway and a place of…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Kingston Russell Stone Circle
Dorset
Kingston Russell is Dorset’s largest surviving stone circle, an unexcavated Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) monument whose fallen…
- Near Abbotsbury
- 1.6 km from car park
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kingswood Abbey
Gloucestershire
Its abbey church vanished so completely that no one knows exactly where it stood: only a lavishly carved gatehouse survived the Dissolution (Henry…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kington St. Michael Priory
Wiltshire
Its last Prioress, Dame Marie Denys, stepped into the role at the very moment Thomas Cromwell's commissioners began dismantling England's monasteri…
- Near Kington St Michael
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kintbury Abbey
Berkshire
Two attempts to establish a religious house here, two centuries apart, left only paperwork behind: no abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) walls…
- Near Kintbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirby Bellars Priory
Leicestershire
Kirby Bellars Priory preserves the transformation of Roger de Beler’s chantry college into an Augustinian house with wide parish responsibilities,…
- Near Kirby Bellars
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkham Priory
North Yorkshire
A rare, near-complete English Gothic gatehouse survives here, and the ruins later trained the armoured divisions that stormed the D-Day beaches.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkstall Abbey
West Yorkshire
A ruined Cistercian house founded about 1152, now standing in a public park on the north bank of the Aire.
- Near Leeds
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkstead Abbey
Lincolnshire
Kirkstead Abbey preserves the fragment and earthworks of a major Cistercian foundation from Fountains Abbey, whose 1537 suppression followed the Li…
- Near Woodhall Spa
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Kirkton of Bourtie stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Its broken recumbent stone is the longest known of its kind in Scotland: the sole survivor of what were once three stone circles in this parish.
- Near Inverurie
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knaresborough Priory
North Yorkshire
England's only Trinitarian priory: a monastery headed by a prior: in Yorkshire grew up around a fugitive hermit's riverside cave, even though its f…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knights Templar Church, Dover
Kent
This rare round-plan church makes the uncertainty worth seeing: its architecture keeps the Templar legend alive while records point instead toward…
- Near Dover
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Knock of Alves
Moray
Six weathered boulders share a wooded hill with a much larger, older stronghold, one refortified deep into the Pictish (of the Picts, the people of…
- Near Elgin
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knockmoy Abbey
County Galway
Its chancel once held one of only four surviving medieval tempera wall-paintings in Ireland: a rarity conservators have worked to protect since the…
- Near Tuam
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kylemore Abbey
County Galway
A private Victorian mansion built for a grieving widower's honeymoon estate became, within a generation, a refuge for nuns bombed out of Belgium: t…
- Near Letterfrack
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kyme Priory
Lincolnshire
A community of twelve Augustinian canons that clung to its way of life so hard it paid the Crown as much as it earned rather than close early: and…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lacock Abbey (monastery)
Wiltshire
A single noblewoman's grief founded a working nunnery of landowners' daughters that ran sheep flocks 2,000 strong and kept its own scriptorium: not…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lancaster Priory
Lancashire
Its oak choirstalls, carved in 1340, are the third oldest in England, and beneath the chancel (the part of a church around the altar) lie the burie…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lanercost Priory
Cumbria
Its walls were built from plundered Hadrian's Wall stone, including Roman inscriptions, and its monks wrote the Lanercost Chronicle, a key source f…
- Near Brampton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Lang Stane of Hilton
Aberdeen City
A granite monolith nearly three metres tall standing in Hilton, one of several Aberdeen stones sharing the name Lang Stane: Scots for long stone.
- Near Aberdeen
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Lang Stane, Aberdeen
Aberdeen City
A keel-shaped base ties this Union Street stone to Aberdeenshire's recumbent circles: raised around 3000 BC, before writing reached Britain: long b…
- Near Aberdeen
- Step-free
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Sacred place · Medieval
Langley Abbey
Norfolk
Langley Abbey preserves a Premonstratensian foundation where church and barn ruins, earthworks and fish ponds reveal the wider working landscape of…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Langley Priory
Leicestershire
For a few decades in the late 1200s the nuns here tried to pass themselves off as Cistercians rather than Benedictines, purely to dodge a tithe bil…
- Near Leicester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Langney Priory
East Sussex
Langney Priory is the surviving grange of Lewes Priory: a working agricultural estate whose threatened fabric preserves the economic infrastructure…
- Near Eastbourne
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lapley Priory
Staffordshire
A late Anglo-Saxon monastery dependent on the Benedictine house of Saint-Remi at Reims.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Latton Priory
Essex
Latton Priory preserves the footprint of a small moated Augustinian house whose church and cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's centra…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Launde Abbey
Leicestershire
The chapel's monument to Gregory Cromwell, son of Henry VIII's chief minister, was singled out by Nikolaus Pevsner as one of the purest early Renai…
- Near Launde
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Launde Priory
Leicestershire
The Tudor secretary who dismantled England's monasteries kept this one for himself, building his family's manor house directly over the vanished ch…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lavendon Abbey
Buckinghamshire
Its buildings have vanished completely, yet the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot)'s earthworks, field system and two fishponds survive…
- Near Lavendon
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lavenham Priory
Suffolk
Henry VIII's Comptroller is said to have fined the owner the equivalent of a million pounds for displaying too much ostentatious wealth.
- Near Lavenham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lechlade Priory
Gloucestershire
Its hospital wing survives disguised as a riverside pub - one of the few tangible links to a priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose real busines…
- Easy path
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hornchurch Priory
Greater London
Hornchurch Priory was a small alien house that shaped the spiritual and landholding life of Havering for more than two centuries before its estates…
- Near Hornchurch
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Sacred place · Medieval
Inch Abbey
County Down
Inch Abbey preserves a Cistercian refoundation on an older Quoile monastery site, linking Viking attack, Anglo-Norman penance, English monastic net…
- Near Downpatrick
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ireland's Eye
County Dublin
Ireland’s Eye rewards the crossing with an unusually compact sequence: an early ecclesiastical enclosure, Napoleonic coastal defence, and protected…
- Near Howth
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
John's Lane Church
County Dublin
John’s Lane shows how a major Gothic-revival church reasserted an Augustinian presence on a site whose medieval predecessor had vanished in war.
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kersal Priory
Greater Manchester
Kersal Priory represents a small Cluniac community whose medieval dependence, later independence and dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monas…
- Near Kersal
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilburn Priory
Greater London
Kilburn Priory began as a hermitage beside a stream and holy well, giving its name to modern Kilburn and preserving a small but formative strand of…
- Near Kilburn
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Kilcroagh, County Tyrone
County Tyrone
Kilcroagh combines a small Tyrone townland’s landscape history with the striking quartz White Stone, a scheduled monument (a site protected by law…
- Near Omagh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killagha Abbey
county-kerry
Killagha preserves the remains of a wealthy medieval religious community whose buildings later became a fortified home and then a burial ground.
- Near Castlemaine
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killashee Round Tower
County Kildare
Killashee’s small round tower preserves evidence of a monastery said to date to AD 454, later passed to the Knights Hospitaller and layered beneath…
- Near Naas
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmartin Glen
Argyll and Bute
Within a six-mile radius of the village of Kilmartin, in Argyll north of Knapdale, stand more than 800 ancient monuments, of which some 150 date fr…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilpeck Priory
Herefordshire
Its monks were refugees from a Welsh raid on Llanthony Priory, and the earthworks of their short-lived home now lie behind a working farmhouse, tra…
- Near Kilpeck
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Kinniside Stone Circle
Cumbria
A prehistoric circle pulled down for farm gate-posts and pieced back together in 1925: its eleven stones now held not by original earth but by conc…
- Near Egremont
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kinsham Grange
Herefordshire
A supposed priory beside the River Lugg that most likely never existed: a rare case where the record itself, not the ruin, is the story.
- Near Leominster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knocklayd
Antrim
Knocklayd is a prominent Antrim Hills summit whose quartz passage tomb, surrounding standing stones and extraordinary townland boundary make it bot…
- Near Ballycastle
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Knowlton Circles
Dorset
One of Dorset's greatest ceremonial landscapes, prehistoric (from the era before writing arrived in these islands), where Stone Age henges and a de…
- Near Knowlton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lammana Priory
Cornwall
A small Benedictine priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: linking Looe Island to the mainland, where two monks served chapels…
- Near Looe
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lancaster Blackfriars
Lancashire
Lancaster Blackfriars marks the former site of a medieval friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Launceston Priory
Cornwall
An Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose lost buildings were proposed for a Cornish cathedral, then redisco…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Leaze stone circle
Cornwall
Leaze stone circle is a fragmentary Bodmin Moor ring whose surviving granite stones, lost elements and nearby prehistoric (predating the written re…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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