On tourist trail in monks’ footsteps

Picturesque ruins of our once-mighty medieval abbeys rise out of the landscape like huge fossilised skeletons. And Yorkshire has some of Europe’s finest, writes Roger Ratcliffe.

IT was all Anne Boleyn’s fault, apparently. She stands accused of wrecking the pious peace and tranquility which for centuries had enveloped our great monasteries. “Persistent”, “calculating” and “determined” are among the words historians have used to describe her pursuit of Henry VIII at the time he was married to Catherine of Aragon. But she came with a devilishly high price tag for Henry. Before he could make Anne his wife, he had to smash the immense power of the Catholic Church.

Thus began the process of overturning English obedience to Rome, a relationship which had been forged 900 years earlier during a landmark gathering of Christian missionaries at Whitby Abbey.

Because Anne was unwilling merely to be Henry’s mistress, in order to marry her he appealed to Rome for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. When Pope Clement VII refused, Henry reached for the nuclear option. He declared himself head of the church in England, closed down the nation’s 650 monastic communities and had his commissioners confiscate their wealth and strip valuable lead from abbey roofs.

That is a simplified version of why the authority of our great abbeys was broken and their buildings became ruins. But it is not the end of the story. Fast-forward to the 21st century, the abbeys are now some of the UK’s biggest tourist attractions.

Not that they were ever likely to slip down the back of the historical sofa. As centuries passed, they became ever more fascinating, not least because of their remote and scenic locations, which created the ethereal atmosphere necessary for monks to devote themselves to prayer and produce their exquisitely illuminated biblical manuscripts. By the 19th century, JMW Turner was sketching and painting some of the ruins. William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë were also fans.

At Whitby Abbey, its gaunt sandstone shell rising dramatically from a headland above the harbour, almost 200,000 people paid to look round in 2022, an increase of 25 per cent over 2021. It was the abbey’s busiest ever year and elevated it to the list of the most vis

CLIFFHANGER: Main picture right, Whitby Abbey was visited by some 200,000 paying visitors in 2022, while Fountains Abbey, above, is one of the National Trust’s top ten attractions.