Sacred place · Medieval
Leechwell
Devon
Totnes’s Leechwell preserves a long healing tradition around three springs, while its lanes, troughs and rediscovered immersion pool show how water…
- Easy path
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 8 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lees Priory
Derbyshire
Its blurred status between a dependent monastic cell and a formally styled priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey,…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leez Priory
Essex
Leez Priory combines an Augustinian foundation with a major Tudor mansion, retaining monastic drains, ponds and walls within a Grade I-listed Essex…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Legbourne Priory
Lincolnshire
A small nunnery whose one detailed record survives almost by accident: a bishop's 1440 inspection that caught its prioress entertaining relatives o…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Roman
Legs Cross
County Durham
The carved lettering that gave this Anglo-Saxon cross its name survived a thousand years only to be chiselled away after 1966, leaving historians a…
- Near Bishop Auckland
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Abbey
Leicestershire
Leicester Abbey was the county’s wealthiest Augustinian house, home to Henry Knighton’s chronicle and the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530.
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Friars of the Sack
Leicestershire
One of only a handful of English houses of the Friars of the Sack, a mendicant order so obscure that its Leicester friary (the base of a mendicant…
- Near Leicester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester's Church, Denbigh
Denbighshire
A vast Elizabethan preaching-house left roofless when its patron's money and his only son both ran out: the sole attempt at a new Protestant cathed…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lenton Priory
Nottinghamshire
Lenton’s Cluniac monastic house connected Nottingham with France, Peak District wealth, royal travel and a major market before Henry VIII’s closure…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leominster Abbey
Herefordshire
An abbess abducted from her own convent in 1046 and a prayer book copied almost entirely by an anonymous nun are the two threads that survive to na…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leominster nunnery
Herefordshire
No wall or door of it has ever been found: an Anglo-Saxon nunnery that vanished so completely its ground may lie hidden beneath a later religious h…
- Near Leominster
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leonard Stanley Priory
Gloucestershire
A single roof once held both a working parish church and a private monastic choir: a rare Augustinian-turned-Benedictine arrangement whose carvings…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lesnes Abbey
Greater London
Lesnes Abbey is a rare London ruin where a small 12th-century canons’ house, Peasants’ Revolt episode and former marshland landscape are preserved…
- Near Abbey Wood
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Letheringham Priory
Suffolk
A small outlying cell of the Augustinian house at Ipswich, founded at the end of the twelfth century.
- Near Letheringham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lewes Priory
East Sussex
The Mise of Lewes, a step toward England's Parliament, was settled here in 1264, and it was a Victorian railway cutting, not archaeology, that firs…
- Near Hastings
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lilleshall Abbey
Shropshire
Lilleshall was England’s rigorist Arrouaisian Augustinian abbey, built from a disputed royal-collegiate transfer and sustained by wide estates befo…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Limebrook Priory
Herefordshire
Only one wall of this small Marcher nunnery still stands, yet earthworks, a reused-stone cottage and a fishpond preserve the full footprint of a ho…
- Near Lingen
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lincluden Collegiate Church
Dumfries and Galloway
Lincluden’s ruins record the transformation of Galloway’s first nunnery into a richly endowed collegiate church: a church staffed by a college of p…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lindisfarne
Northumberland
Lindisfarne concentrates Northumbria’s conversion, the making of the Gospels, Cuthbert’s enduring cult and the raid that reshaped European memory f…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Linton Chapel
Orkney Islands
An enigmatic small coastal chapel whose proximity to the disputed Castle Bloody offers a rare glimpse of medieval worship beside a much older Shapi…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lislaughtin Abbey
County Kerry
On the east bank of the Ballylongford Creek, a little over a kilometre north of Ballylongford in County Kerry, the roofless church of Lislaughtin A…
- Near Listowel
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Sacred place · Medieval
Litten Chapel
Berkshire
Its carved oak roof trusses, hidden by later ceilings for generations and only uncovered in 1980, survive as one of the clearest examples of early…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Little Malvern Priory
Worcestershire
One surviving window panel is thought to be among the only contemporary portraits ever made of Edward V, the boy king who vanished from history wit…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Llanfaes Friary
Isle of Anglesey
Llanfaes Friary preserves the buried remains of a Franciscan house founded for Joan, Lady of Wales, whose survival through Edward I’s forced depopu…
- Near Beaumaris
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Sacred place · Medieval
Llanllugan Abbey
Powys
One of only two Cistercian nunneries in Wales, home to five women in 1377: and to sixty in a poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym.
- Near Llanllugan
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Priory
Monmouthshire
Llanthony Priory is one of Wales’s greatest medieval monastic ruins, founded in the remote Vale of Ewyas and rebuilt after conflict before the Diss…
- Near Llanthony
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Secunda Priory
Gloucestershire
For two centuries the chapter house here held the tombs of the earls of Hereford and the Bohun dynasty, and its walls are still tied, however uncer…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Lochmaben Stone
Dumfries and Galloway
On the shore of the Solway Firth, near where the Kirtle Water empties into the estuary, a single weathered granite boulder stands roughly 7 feet ta…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Locko Preceptory
Derbyshire
The only recorded Lazarite preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar) in England, it once returned an annual incom…
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Sacred place · Medieval
London Charterhouse
Greater London
The London Charterhouse is an exceptionally layered Clerkenwell complex: a Black Death burial ground became a Carthusian priory, a monastery run by…
- Near Clerkenwell
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Long Bennington Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny outpost of the Norman abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) of Savigny that for over a century supported just one resident monk, bef…
- Near Long Bennington
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Long Meg and Her Daughters
Cumbria
England's third-widest stone circle, its outlying monolith carved with cup-and-ring art that echoes Newgrange and stands aligned on the midwinter s…
- Near Penrith
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Longleat Priory
Wiltshire
A community of Augustinian canons answering directly to the Dean of Salisbury for three centuries, whose suppressed priory: a smaller monastery led…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Longstone of Minchinhampton
Gloucestershire
Longstone’s naturally pierced limestone links a surviving monolith with a local healing tradition, while nearby barrows and finds place it in an ol…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Loupin Stanes
Dumfries and Galloway
A low platform was built up out of the ground beside Eskdalemuir before the twelve stones of the Loupin Stanes were set in an oval on top of it, at…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Louth Park Abbey
Lincolnshire
A monk buried at the founder's request beside the very knight whose deathbed gift nearly ruined the house in litigation: Louth Park's archive reads…
- Near Lincoln
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Machrie Moor Stone Circles
North Ayrshire
Machrie Moor gathers stone circles, burials and earlier timber settings into an exceptional prehistoric (before any written account of Britain exis…
- Near Machrie
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Madron Well and Madron Well Chapel
Cornwall
Madron Well and its ruined chapel combine an early Christian sacred landscape, a once vital water source and enduring Cornish traditions of healing…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maen Huail
Denbighshire
A humble market stone was recast by folklore as the execution block where King Arthur beheaded a rival: legend layered onto stone centuries after i…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Maen Llia
Powys
A diamond of Old Red Sandstone, twelve feet high, whose evening shadow reaches the river between April and September - which is probably the source…
- Near Ystradfellte
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Maen Madoc
Powys
A ten-foot stone beside a Roman road, inscribed for a man called Dervacus: and named after a Madoc nobody can identify.
- Near Ystradfellte
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maenan Abbey
Conwy
A Cistercian house forcibly moved by Edward I, dissolved in 1537 and largely dismantled, with medieval cloister (the covered walkway round a monast…
- Near Conwy
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maiden Bradley Priory
Wiltshire
Its last prior's own words to Henry VIII's commissioners: six children, a claimed papal licence to keep a mistress, and a boast about the Glastonbu…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Malmesbury Abbey
Wiltshire
One of England's few religious houses with continuous life from the 7th century to the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Malton Priory
North Yorkshire
The only church of the Gilbertine order: England's sole native monastic order: still used for regular worship, though its tower, transepts and chan…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Marden Henge
Wiltshire
Built from earth and timber rather than stone, Britain's largest known henge shaped its boundary around the River Avon: a landscape logic unmatched…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Margam Abbey
Neath Port Talbot
Margam Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation with an active medieval intellectual legacy, including the Annales de Margan, within a church and ru…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Marham Abbey
Norfolk
Marham Abbey records a small Cistercian nunnery founded by an aristocratic woman, whose limited wealth placed it in the first 1536 wave of dissolut…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Markby Priory
Lincolnshire
A 1438 visitation record survives in unusual, damning detail: debts, drink and scandal in a house the bishop judged worse-kept than any other in th…
- Near Markby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Markyate Priory
Hertfordshire
A Benedictine nunnery that grew from the hiding place of a woman who fled an arranged marriage in men's clothing, and whose life became one of the…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mattersey Priory
Nottinghamshire
Mattersey’s isolated male Gilbertine community carried on for centuries without rebuilding its church after the 1279 fire, later relying on royal m…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maxstoke Priory
Warwickshire
Maxstoke preserves an unusually complete fourteenth-century Augustinian precinct, including buried waterworks and a moated manor, but its standing…
- Near Maxstoke
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Mayburgh Henge
Cumbria
Its ring was raised from river cobbles rather than dug as a ditch-and-bank earthwork, a construction method that sets it apart from almost every ot…
- Near Penrith
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Meaux Abbey
East Riding of Yorkshire
Its sale of land at Wyke to Edward I in 1293 helped found Kingston upon Hull: a monastery whose estate dealings shaped the growth of a major Englis…
- Near Beverley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Melchbourne Preceptory
Bedfordshire
A house of the Knights Hospitaller whose founding family's descendants rose to lead the order in England, and whose last stone survived eight centu…
- Near Melchbourne
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mellifont Abbey
County Louth
The first Cistercian abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) built in Ireland, and the template every one of its daughter houses across the country…
- Near Drogheda
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Mên Scryfa
Cornwall
Mên Scryfa preserves an early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) Latin inscription on a standing stone, connecting…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mendham Priory
Suffolk
A Suffolk priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: dissolved in 1537, about which the readily available sources record almo…
- Near Mendham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Merton Priory
Greater London
Merton Priory was a major Augustinian house on the River Wandle where the Statute of Merton was enacted in 1236, while its association with Thomas…
- Near Merton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Michelham Priory
East Sussex
A moated Augustinian priory whose surviving buildings: barn, gatehouse, refectory and watermill: trace six centuries of use, ending as a Canadian a…
- Near Hailsham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Micklegate Priory
North Yorkshire
Its parish church, Holy Trinity on Micklegate, still stands on the same ground the monks held: a rare unbroken line from secular canons to Benedict…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Minsden Chapel
Hertfordshire
A 14th-century chapel that outlived its own congregation, then outlived its own building: its ruin has been photographed as a fake haunting, leased…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Minting Priory
Lincolnshire
A Lincolnshire outpost of a French abbey, the priory: a monastery headed by a prior: was seized by the Crown three times during the wars with Franc…
- Near Minting
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Sacred place · Medieval
Missenden Abbey
Buckinghamshire
The second Arrouasian community ever founded in England, its church once held the largest bell in Buckinghamshire, and a country house built from i…
- Near Great Missenden
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Mitchell's Fold
Shropshire
Mitchell’s Fold is a stone circle whose surviving dolerite pillars, nearby ancient monuments and disputed legends preserve a layered ritual landsca…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Moel Tŷ Uchaf
Denbighshire
Moel Tŷ Uchaf is a compact Welsh upland monument whose 41-stone ring and central cist, a stone-lined box grave, preserve the ambiguous boundary bet…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leeds Priory
Kent
Leeds Priory was a major Augustinian house on the River Len, whose excavated footprint documents more than four centuries of religious and economic…
- Near Canterbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Austin Friars
Leicestershire
Leicester Austin Friars was a modest Augustinian Hermit priory, a monastery run by a prior, with the unusual feature of two cloisters and a documen…
- Near Leicester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Leigh Cell
Devon
A recorded monastic site near Churchstow, and almost the only evidence of a religious presence in this part of south Devon: though what survives of…
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Leper Stone
Essex
The Leper Stone is a large sarsen near Newport whose association with a medieval leper hospital and possible prehistoric (predating the written rec…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lessingham Priory
Norfolk
Lessingham Priory is a 1090 Norfolk foundation known almost entirely through the record of its existence, illustrating how completely a medieval ho…
- Near Lessingham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lewisham Priory
Greater London
Lewisham Priory connects early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) landholding across the Channel with Henry V’s sup…
- Near Lewisham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Little Dunmow Priory
Essex
Little Dunmow preserves the Lady Chapel of an Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior: founded in 1104, connecting medieval patronage, bu…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Little Horkesley Priory
Essex
Little Horkesley Priory was a Cluniac daughter house whose short institutional history connects Essex with Thetford and Lewes before the survival o…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Little Marlow Priory
Buckinghamshire
Known today mainly through a stray Latin alias in a 1326 lawsuit, this small Buckinghamshire nunnery quietly outlived three centuries before Henry…
- Near Little Marlow
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Little Meg
Cumbria
One surviving boulder still carries a crisply cut spiral and rings, rare Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) rock art p…
- Near Penrith
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Abbey
powys
Eric Gill drew Gill Sans and Perpetua in these buildings. Forty years earlier, monks and local farm boys reported seeing the Virgin Mary in the fie…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Loders Priory
Dorset
Loders Priory illustrates the precarious history of an English cell dependent on a Norman abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot), repe…
- Near Loders
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lossenham Friary
Kent
As England’s third Carmelite house, Lossenham makes a vanished landscape legible through reported foundations, a stone coffin, and the community’s…
- Near Canterbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
Loughinisland Churches
Down
Loughinisland’s three church ruins make one island graveyard a record of changing worship, from medieval fabric to seventeenth-century rebuilding a…
- Near Downpatrick
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lulworth Abbey
Dorset
Lulworth Abbey briefly sheltered refugee French Trappist monks after the French Revolution, recording a small but vivid episode of international mo…
- Near East Lulworth
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lyminster Priory
West Sussex
A house of Benedictine nuns, possibly a Saxon royal minster: originally a missionary church; now kept as a title of honour: before that, whose chur…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Macosquin Abbey
County Londonderry
Macosquin was a Cistercian daughter house of Morimond whose medieval fabric vanished, leaving a thirteenth-century church window at its successor s…
- Near Macosquin
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Maelmin Henge
Northumberland
Maelmin Henge is a modern, research-based reconstruction that makes the Neolithic (the first farming age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) and Early Bronze Ag…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maltby Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Two conflicting medieval accounts disagree on which military order founded this Lincolnshire house first: the Hospitallers directly, or the Templar…
- Near Maltby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Marland Grange
Greater Manchester
Marland Grange records the long agricultural reach of Cistercian abbeys around Rochdale, even though its buildings have disappeared and their exact…
- Near Rochdale
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Marmont Priory
Norfolk
Marmont Priory was a tiny Gilbertine chantry whose 1204 foundation joined private commemoration, King John’s provision for Eleanor of Aquitaine’s s…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Marsh Barton Priory
Devon
Marsh Barton Priory records a small Augustinian house whose Exeter property and dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s)…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Marton Priory
North Yorkshire
Marton Priory’s surviving mill earthworks and reused masonry preserve a rare material trace of an Augustinian double house dissolved in 1536.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Maumanorig
county-kerry
Within a circular enclosure, Maumanorig gathers a church site, hut remains, grave markers and an inscribed stone that names Colmán the pilgrim.
- Near Dingle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mayne Preceptory
Dorset
Mayne Preceptory records the Knights Hospitaller’s medieval presence in Dorset, whose estates changed the name of Friar Mayne and supported a wider…
- Near Broadmayne
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Sacred place · Medieval
Melcombe Priory
Dorset
Melcombe Priory was England’s last Dominican foundation, combining a short monastic history with a documented contribution to Melcombe Regis’s coas…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Menacuddle
Cornwall
Menacuddle is a scheduled fifteenth-century holy well in wooded St Austell, remembered both for its memorial restoration and for local wishing and…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Millbrook Priory
Bedfordshire
A rare recorded case of two small Bedfordshire monastic cells, Millbrook and Beaulieu at Moddry, being formally merged into a single dependent hous…
- Near Millbrook
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Sacred place · Medieval
Minster in Thanet Priory
Kent
A minster: a missionary church originally, now a title of honour: at Thanet preserves the legacy of a seventh-century double monastery associated w…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Minster Lovell Priory
Oxfordshire
A monastic house whose exact site in Minster Lovell has been lost entirely: remembered only by name and a rough position between two better-known v…
- Near Minster Lovell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Moatenden Priory
Kent
Moatenden Priory was England’s first Trinitarian house, founded in 1224; its surviving moat and fishponds preserve the landscape framework of a med…
- Near Headcorn
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Sacred place · Medieval
Moccas Monastery
Herefordshire
A single grid reference fixes its exact site, yet neither its founders, its order, nor its fate were ever recorded: a monastery known only by name.
- Near Moccas
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Modbury Priory
Devon
Modbury Priory records a long-lived Benedictine dependency in Devon, from its Norman foundation through the politics of alien priories, dissolution…
- Near Modbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Modeney Priory
Norfolk
Modeney Priory was a small Benedictine cell of Ramsey Abbey whose post-dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) ownership…
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