Skip to content
The Great Britain Guide

Abbeys & priories · Yorkshire & the Humber

Yorkshire's ruined abbeys

Six Cistercian monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII, kept beautiful by the National Trust and English Heritage.

Yorkshire was the heartland of medieval English monasticism — at the Dissolution in 1538 it lost more abbeys than any other county. Six survive in spectacular ruin: Fountains, Rievaulx, Bolton, Whitby, Jervaulx, Byland. Each is a different mood — Fountains is the grandest, Whitby the most haunting, Bolton the most photogenic.

Places in this guide