Sacred place · Medieval
Molana Abbey
County Waterford
An island monastery whose monks helped compile a foundational text of early Irish canon law, later reduced to an ivy-choked ruin and finally absorb…
- Near Cappoquin
- Some walking
By type
Sacred places of Britain & Ireland
Page 9 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monasteranenagh Abbey
County Limerick
A cannon was turned on the sheltering community here in 1580, and the massacre that followed left the abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an…
- Near Croom
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Inisnag
County Kilkenny
A battle in 745 and an anchorite's death in 889 are almost all that survive of a community whose own medieval clergy could not agree on its patron…
- Near Thomastown
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Mohill-Manchan
County Leitrim
A single monastic site lived through three separate lives: Irish saint's church, Augustinian priory, and briefly revived friary: each ended by forc…
- Near Mohill
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monk Bretton Priory
South Yorkshire
A Cluniac monastery whose 1350 endowment for Black Death thanksgiving prayers still stands, and whose ruins have been re-excavated by Sheffield arc…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monk's Well
Merseyside
Monk’s Well is a rare, dated 1414 holy well in Liverpool, preserving a medieval water source, charitable expectation and the memory of a vanished m…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monkton Farleigh Priory
Wiltshire
A widow's act of religious patronage outlived the priory: a smaller monastery led by a prior: itself: its well house still stands and still marks t…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Montacute Priory
Somerset
A Cluniac monastic house under a prior, founded between 1078 and 1102 by William, Count of Mortain.
- Near Montacute
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Sacred place · Medieval
Moor Abbey
County Tipperary
A Franciscan community returned here again and again after dissolution, burning and murder: until a dispute with a bishop's deputy, not the Crown,…
- Near Kilmallock
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Mor Stein
Orkney Islands
An isolated three-metre standing stone whose uncarved bulk records the considerable communal labour of quarrying, moving and raising a monument who…
- Near Shapinsay
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Morville Priory
Shropshire
Morville Priory was Shrewsbury Abbey’s tiny Benedictine cell and diocesan guest house, preserving how a major monastery administered parish revenue…
- Near Morville
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mothel Abbey
County Waterford
A monastery re-founded in the 1140s grew into one of the Augustinian order's major landholders in central Waterford, yet all that survives is a sin…
- Near Carrick-on-Suir
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mottisfont Abbey
Hampshire
A medieval monastery survives inside the walls of a country house, its church still standing as the mansion's core beneath a name its Georgian owne…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mount Grace Priory
North Yorkshire
Mount Grace is England’s best-preserved accessible Carthusian site, revealing hermit-style monastic life, Yorkist and Lancastrian patronage, major…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Mount Pleasant henge
Dorset
Mount Pleasant henge, a bank-and-ditch enclosure around a circular space, is a major late Stone Age Dorset monument whose vast earthwork, a bank-an…
- Near Dorchester
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Moyne Abbey
County Mayo
One of Connacht's most complete Franciscan friaries, its cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) arcade and traceried…
- Near Ballina
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Muchelney Abbey
Somerset
An abbey that paid its Domesday tax in six thousand eels a year: and whose thatched monks' lavatory is considered unique in Britain.
- Near Muchelney
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Sacred place · Medieval
Muckross Abbey
County Kerry
In the central cloistered courtyard of Muckross Abbey stands a large yew tree, its trunk rising through an open square of arched walkways that loca…
- Near Killarney
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mungret Abbey
County Limerick
Three roofless medieval churches still stand together on one site, the rare physical trace of a monastery once reputed to hold six churches and 1,5…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Murrisk Abbey
County Mayo
Local tradition ties the ruins to a church founded by Saint Patrick himself, and the surviving 1457 grant names the family who turned that legend i…
- Near Westport
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Neath Abbey
Neath Port Talbot
Neath Abbey was once Wales’s largest abbey and a rare site where medieval monastic ruins were later engulfed by copper and iron industry, then unco…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ness of Brodgar
Orkney Islands
Ness of Brodgar preserves an archaeological site between the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness.
- Near Stenness
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Netley Abbey
Hampshire
A house that was never rich and never famous for scholarship still left behind the most complete Cistercian monastery standing in southern England,…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
New Romney Priory
Kent
New Romney Priory preserves the remains of a likely monastic grange linked to Pontigny Abbey in France, recording the impact of Anglo-French war on…
- Near New Romney
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newark Friary
Nottinghamshire
Newark Friary preserves the town’s short-lived Observant Franciscan foundation, later absorbed into a changing commercial streetscape after Henry V…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newark Priory
Surrey
A roofless Augustinian religious house stands on its own island in the River Wey. Its rents once ran from London to Winchester before its closure i…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newbattle Abbey
Midlothian
Newbattle Abbey links Cistercian settlement, early Scottish coal extraction, repeated Anglo-Scottish conflict, Reformation (the break with Rome tha…
- Near Dalkeith
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newbo Abbey
Lincolnshire
Its founder was the ringleader behind one of medieval England's deadliest anti-Jewish massacres: a stain on the abbey (a monastic house under the r…
- Near Sedgebrook
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newburgh Priory
North Yorkshire
Newburgh Priory connects a twelfth-century Augustinian foundation to Tudor conversion, Fauconberg and Wombwell family history, and a long-lived est…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newenham Abbey
Devon
Newenham Abbey was a Cistercian house at Axminster whose foundation, Black Death losses, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in th…
- Near Axminster
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newminster Abbey
Northumberland
Newminster was more than a lost Cistercian monastery: its founding abbot’s shrine, vast estate and three daughter houses made it a northern powerho…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newnham Priory
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire's oldest religious foundation, tracing an unbroken line from pre-Conquest secular canons to a dissolved Augustinian priory: a monaster…
- Near Bedford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead Abbey
Nottinghamshire
Newstead layers Henry II’s penitent Augustinian foundation, its conversion after Henry VIII’s closure of the monasteries in the 1530s, Lord Byron’s…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newton Longville Priory
Buckinghamshire
A tiny Cluniac outpost whose loyalty to a French mother house made it a target in wartime, and whose estates ultimately built the foundation of an…
- Near Newton Longville
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newtown Abbey
County Meath
The Augustinian house on the Boyne east of Trim, founded about 1206, where a synod reordered five Meath sees in 1216 and a prior stood accused of m…
- Near Trim
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Nine Ladies
Derbyshire
Ten weathered stones pretending to be nine, watched over by a leaning outlier scratched with a conman's graffiti, and defended for a decade by a pr…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Nine Stones Close
Derbyshire
Four surviving stones on Harthill Moor retain two shallow cup marks, while the lost uprights explain the traditional name Nine Stones Close.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Nine Stones, Altarnun
Cornwall
Nine Stones is Bodmin Moor’s smallest stone circle, restored from near collapse in 1889 and retaining an unusual central granite post.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Nine Stones, Winterbourne Abbas
Dorset
The Nine Stones is a small Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) Dorset circle whose unusual pair of tall stones, long an…
- Near Winterbourne Abbas
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ninestane Rig
Scottish Borders
Legend says the lord of Hermitage Castle was boiled alive here in 1320, in a cauldron slung between the two big stones.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Nocton Priory
Lincolnshire
A monastic house whose stone was recycled twice over: first into a Tudor-era mansion, then into nothing at all: leaving only earthworks on Abbey (a…
- Near Lincoln
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Sacred place · Medieval
North Abbey, Youghal
County Cork
A thirteenth-century Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose Marian image made Youghal a centre of devotion unt…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
North Mains
Perth and Kinross
Two pits and a cremation were placed here before the henge was built: a prehistoric earthwork of bank and ditch enclosing a circular space, with th…
- Near Crieff
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
North Ormsby Priory
Lincolnshire
A double house of nuns and canons under the rare Gilbertine order, its enclosure of a hundred women and fifty men now reduced to grass-grown earthw…
- Near North Ormsby
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Norton Priory
Cheshire
Excavated from 1971 over twelve years by modern archaeological methods on a scale unmatched anywhere in Europe, this is the most thoroughly underst…
- Near Runcorn
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Norwich Cathedral
Norfolk
Norwich Cathedral is one of England’s most complete Norman cathedrals: a vast flint-and-Caen-stone church whose towering spire, exceptional cloiste…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Nostell Priory
West Yorkshire
A Palladian house of 1733 built for the Winn family on the site of a twelfth-century Augustinian priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Notley Abbey
Buckinghamshire
A private house built from the bones of one of the Oxford region's richest Augustinian monasteries, later home to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Nuneaton Priory
Warwickshire
Nuneaton was one of only four English nunneries of Fontevraud, a large female religious community whose surviving church plan and precinct gave the…
- Near Nuneaton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Oakham Market Cross
Rutland
A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century market cross, of the kind that served as a gathering point and market venue.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ogbourne Priory
Wiltshire
A Benedictine priory, a monastery headed by a prior, that spent much of its two-century life not as a monastery but as the paper name for a Norman…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Old Buckenham Priory
Norfolk
Old Buckenham Priory transformed an abandoned Norman castle site into an Augustinian house with estates in 42 Norfolk parishes, showing how monasti…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Old Church of St Nidan, Llanidan
Isle of Anglesey
Old St Nidan’s is a partly ruined double-naved medieval church near the Menai Strait, preserving a six-arch arcade and relic traditions despite 19t…
- Near Brynsiencyn
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Old Minster, Winchester
Hampshire
For over a century this was reputedly the largest church in Europe, and the resting place of Anglo-Saxon kings whose bones now lie in chests around…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Old St Bartholomew's Church, Lower Sapey
Worcestershire
Its 1990s restorers worked "to make it appear as though we had never been on the site": conservation by near-total restraint rather than repair.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Old St Peter's Church, Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd
Denbighshire
A roofless medieval church whose paper trail: a 1291 tax record and a 1535 valuation of £418: survives more fully than the building itself.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Orphir Round Church
Orkney Islands
Orphir Round Church preserves the remains of a circular medieval church dedicated to Saint Nicholas.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Osney Abbey
Oxfordshire
For four centuries the wealthiest monastery in Oxford, its bell Great Tom now the loudest voice in the city's skyline: hung not in its own ruined t…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ossington Preceptory
Nottinghamshire
Ossington was a Hospitaller estate centre whose disputed village grant reveals how medieval military-religious orders accumulated and defended Engl…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Our Lady's Well, Hempsted
Gloucestershire
A 14th-century well house carved with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and an angel: physical record of a pilgrimage for cures revived as recently as 1989.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Owston Abbey
Leicestershire
One of Leicestershire's poorest Augustinian houses, its chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) survives folded into the parish…
- Near Owston
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Padley Chapel
Derbyshire
A gatehouse range rebuilt as a chapel in 1933 to honour two priests hanged, drawn and quartered for their faith in 1588.
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Paisley Abbey
Renfrewshire
Robert II was born here by caesarean section in 1316, after his mother fell from her horse nearby. A stone marker stands where she came off.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist
essex
The oldest Orthodox religious community in the United Kingdom, and a double monastery of monks and nuns together: an arrangement rare enough in Ort…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Patrixbourne Priory
Kent
Patrixbourne shows how a Kent parish church became an alien priory cell, first tied to Normandy and then transferred to Merton in 1409.
- Near Patrixbourne
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Sacred place · Medieval
Penally Abbey
Pembrokeshire
An old rectory overlooking Carmarthen Bay, a mile and a half from Tenby, now a country house hotel.
- Near Penally
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Penrhos Feilw Standing Stones
Isle of Anglesey
Penrhos Feilw’s paired Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) stones are an enigmatic coastal landmark on Holy Island, their deliberate…
- Near Holyhead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pentney Priory
Norfolk
Pentney Priory preserves a Grade I flint gatehouse from an Augustinian house founded around 1130, later merged with Wormegay and recycled into the…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Penwortham Priory
Lancashire
A Norman motte, a lost Benedictine cell, and a demolished Victorian mansion all occupy the same modest hill above the Ribble: three buildings, one…
- Near Penwortham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Iron Age
Perran Round
Cornwall
Perran Round is Cornwall’s best-preserved plen-an-gwary, an earthwork arena: a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building: with uncertai…
- Near Goonhavern
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pershore Abbey
Worcestershire
A Mercian minster refounded, despoiled, burned, rebuilt by a nobleman's patronage, then stripped again for Westminster Abbey: only a lantern tower…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Peterborough Cathedral
Cambridgeshire
One of only four surviving painted medieval wooden ceilings in Europe crowns a nave (the main body of a church, where the congregation gathers) who…
- Near Peterborough
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Pict's Knowe
Dumfries and Galloway
A small sandy bank rises out of the peat-covered valley of the Crooks Pow stream, four kilometres south-west of Dumfries, and it is on this slight…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pill Priory
Pembrokeshire
A Tironensian priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: founded by the Roche family near Milford Haven, reduced to four monk…
- Near Pill
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Molycourt Priory
Norfolk
Molycourt Priory is a near-vanished Benedictine house whose pre-Conquest origin, flood-impoverished fenland estate, absorption by Ely and elusive a…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monasternagalliaghduff
county-limerick
A ruined thirteenth-century nunnery whose church, courtyard and ‘Black Hag’s Cell’ preserve one of Ireland’s earliest recorded communities of relig…
- Near Newcastle West
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Saint David, Wales
Pembrokeshire
On the banks of the Afon Alun, at a place then known as Glyn Rhosyn, Saint David founded a church and monastery that would take his own name in Wel…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monkland Priory
Herefordshire
Little beyond its name and a fixed map reference survives to document this priory, a monastery run by a prior, making it one of the more elusive re…
- Near Monkland
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Monks Kirby Priory
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house of 1077, headed by a prior, suppressed in 1415 when its estates passed to the Carthusians of Axholme.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Moss Farm Road Stone Circle
North Ayrshire
Moss Farm Road preserves a damaged Bronze Age: the period from about 2500 to 800 BC: stone-mound-and-circle monument within Arran’s wider Machrie M…
- Near Machrie
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mount Melleray Abbey
County Waterford
Mount Melleray was Ireland's leading modern Trappist foundation: a refuge born from revolution that founded communities across the English-speaking…
- Near Cappoquin
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Mount St. Joseph Abbey, Roscrea
County Offaly
Mount St Joseph is a living Trappist abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) whose nineteenth-century foundation seeded communities acr…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Movilla Abbey
Down
Movilla connects early Irish scholarship, Viking disruption and Augustinian renewal: its late-medieval ruins mark a monastery once taught by St Fin…
- Near Newtownards
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Moyadam
County Antrim
Moyadam joins a medievally attested place-name, Maigh Doinn or “Donn’s plain”, with a surviving standing stone from before written records reached…
- Near Antrim
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Sacred place · Iron Age
Navan Fort
Armagh
Navan Fort is one of Ireland's great prehistoric (from the era before writing arrived in these islands) ceremonial monuments, where a huge Iron Age…
- Near Armagh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
New Minster, Winchester
Hampshire
Winchester’s New Minster was a royal Benedictine abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) and pilgrimage centre that safeguarded the burials and reli…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead Priory
Lincolnshire
Newstead Priory records a medieval transition from hospital to Augustinian canonry, anchored by the River Gwash between Stamford and Uffington.
- Near Stamford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead-on-Ancholme Priory
Lincolnshire
Newstead-on-Ancholme Priory preserves a rare physical remnant of a small Henry II Gilbertine foundation: a vaulted former priory room incorporated…
- Near Newstead-on-Ancholme
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Sacred place · Medieval
Newtownards Priory
County Down
Newtownards Priory preserves a medieval Dominican church whose layered nave (the western body of the building, where the congregation gathered), cl…
- Near Newtownards
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Nine Maidens stone circle
Devon
The Nine Maidens is a Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) Dartmoor stone circle whose damaged burial setting, survival among clitter…
- Near Belstone
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Nuncotham Priory
Lincolnshire
Nuncotham Priory preserves the earthworks of a Cistercian nunnery whose records reveal both the ordinary constraints of episcopal discipline and th…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Old Church of St Gwenllwyfo, Llanwenllwyfo
Isle of Anglesey
The Old Church of St Gwenllwyfo is a roofless medieval chapel whose reduced walls, lost furnishings and 12th-century font preserve the layered memo…
- Near Amlwch
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Orford Priory
Lincolnshire
Orford Priory was one of nine Premonstratensian canoness houses in historic Lincolnshire, preserving a rare record of female religious life from a…
- Near Stainton le Vale
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Sacred place · Medieval
Otham Abbey
East Sussex
Otham Abbey marks the short-lived first home of a Premonstratensian community later transferred to Bayham, while its chapel and later farmstead pre…
- Near Hastings
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Sacred place · Medieval
Otterton Priory
Devon
Otterton Priory preserves the trace of a Norman-linked Benedictine community whose parish-church tower and reused monastic fabric are the principal…
- Near Otterton
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Oughtboy
County Tyrone
Oughtboy turns an Irish hill-name and scheduled stone alignments into a single landscape story, where language, terrain and protected archaeology r…
- Near Omagh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Painsthorpe Abbey
East Riding of Yorkshire
A community of Anglican Benedictine monks occupied a brick chapel grafted onto a Yorkshire country house for four years, before relocating in 1906…
- Near Beverley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Panfield Priory
Essex
Panfield Priory is a lost Augustinian alien house whose buried foundations preserve a rare Essex link to the Norman monastery of St Étienne at Caen.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Peterstone Priory
Norfolk
Peterstone Priory was an Augustinian house at Burnham Overy, founded before 1200 and incorporated in 1449, linking the village to Norfolk’s medieva…
- Near Burnham Overy
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pheleley Priory
Oxfordshire
A small twelfth-century Benedictine community in a detached part of Bloxham, near Charlbury.
- Near Charlbury
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