Roche Abbey

I thoroughly enjoy exploring ancient places steeped in years of history. I'm the goofy kid with the mile-wide grin on my face, holding a tour pamphlet, walking around thinking things like, "A monk in the 1200s stood right here. He might've looked at that mountain I'm looking at now and wondered about life and work and God and family and all those regular things I think about. Crazy!"

From one goofy tourist to you, I'd like to tell you about Roche Abbey.

Roche Abbey is hidden in the riverbottoms of a secret valley (well, it felt secret to me when I traveled through South Yorkshire to get there one rainy mid-morning). I drove past rose gardens and tree-lined farm houses, turned onto a dirt road that twisted downhill and tunneled through a thick, overgrown forest and came into a peaceful, private valley near the King's Wood and Maltby Beck. Here, you can see the remains of the great gatehouse.

Built in 1147, the abbey housed a working religious community for nearly 400 years. At that time, the abbey's 31 acres were surrounded by a series of walls and courts that provided seclusion--necessary for the life of religious service, reading and manual work the Cistercian monks who lived here lead. Only this gatehouse remains of what used to be a grand, two-story structure just below the cliff I had driven down.

I couldn't get a great picture, but the ceilings were lovely: big arches carved out of stone with etched flowers and symbols. Over in the corner, I saw the remains of a circular stone staircase that once led to the upper floor. Those are the coolest parts, I think. Stairs! To think, someone walked up these stairs everyday! Hey, someone has to get excited about old staircases, and that someone is me.

The gatehouse is where all secular business--checking visitors, that sort of thing--was conducted.

Once you came in through the gate, you were in the Inner Court.

In the 18th century, this tea house was built between the gatehouse and the abbey buildings by the Earl or Lord (I can't remember) who owned it at the time, but more about that in a moment.

First, the Abbey!

The two wings of the church rose majesticaly in the misty rain. I could almost feel the memory of hundreds of years of peoples' stories and legacies rise up before me, permeating the atmosphere with a special, connected-to-the-past feeling.

That sounds creepy. It wasn't creepy. It was....sacred. And so, so neat.

I walked around the perimeter of the grounds....

...across the river (those monks canalized the river! They had a whole system for farming, irrigation, etc. Very clever)...

...into the wooded gardens.

Okay, back to the teahouse. Story time:

After King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monastary and the ensuing pillaging of the empty buildings by local mobs in 1538, the abbey sat neglected for nearly two hundred years.
Then, in 1772, Horace Walpole wrote that Roche Abbey was very beautiful, that it was "hid in such a venerable chasm that you might lie concealed there even from a squire parson of the parish. Lord Scarborough, to whom it belongs, neglects it as much as if he was afraid of ghosts."

So, two years later, Lord Scarborough hired the popular landscapist Lancelot "Capability" Brown--awesome name, right?--to create a Romantic, picturesque garden centured around the ruins of the abbey. It was a big thing, people were all, "How sublime! He'll create an appropriate setting for an actual ruin!" (Yeah, that's how they talked about it, trust me.)

Brown--or as I like to call him, "Capability"--designed a garden that embodied prevailing Romantic tastes by offsetting the two standing wings with "extensive terracing, discrete waterfalls, an artificial lake and islands, and large scale planting of trees," reports the guide book.
The book also describes Capability's controversial decision to destroy some of the ruins to serve the garden design:
"The picturesque was, however, selective about which walls fitted the tableau of ruins, woods, and water. Some were quarried down to enhance others (an action which raised controversy even at that time), whilst elsewhere in-filling between walls and extensive levelling created grass paterres--formally patterned terraces. Among the most notable losses were the destruction of the buildings of the Inner Court, the dismantling of the cloister, and the lowering of the walls of the lay brothers' quarters."

I wandered along a path in the woods and came across one of the discrete waterfalls. It had the ambience of a secret garden, as though I had discovered something that had been overlooked for years and years!

I imagined those silly Victorian lovers walking along the river, being dramatic whilst confessing their true feelings. I have a somewhat overactive imagination...

The artifical Laughton Pond.

View of the Abbey from the woods.

It was a beautiful place to be on a rainy morning.

I was amazed that after nearly a thousand years, the river is still running through the same canals the monks originally constructed!