Busman’s holidays

Charles Moore

Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire

As I head north this summer, I mean to return to Rievaulx Abbey, the first Cistercian abbey in the North. Majestically, yet peacefully placed in Ryedale, it offers Shakespeare’s ‘bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’. Rievaulx’s choirs have been bare and ruined since 1538, when Henry VIII dissolved the abbey.

So much has been written recently about British heritage in relation to slavery that we forget our great buildings’ much more direct involvement in atrocity—that committed by religious conflict. The great abbeys carefully built to inspire the contemplative life were closed and robbed. The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges, however: the ruins provoke contemplation in their own right.

I like English Heritage’s online guide—thorough, clear, well linked. St Aelred, abbot not long after

Rievaulx’s foundation in the 12th century, was so remarkable, it says, that