Welcome to Fountains Abbey near Ripon in North Yorkshire.
As you're about to find out one of the most extraordinary Cistercian monasteries in the
whole of Europe and one of the very most special ruins owned by the National trust.
Looking after special places like this is really about understanding them as fully as possible
and the wonderful archaeological exploration that we've restarted in recent years here is all about
finding out as much about the site as we can. And what we can see is that
contrary to what people have thought there are secrets here that remain hidden,
great riches still to discover and we're just starting out to try and do that.
Fountains Abbey grew from very modest beginnings. It was established in 1132 by twelve monks and a Prior
from Benedictine monasteries in different parts of Yorkshire who felt that their life had got too
easy so we wanted to join the Cistercians for a harder, fresher new look at monastic existence.
They built a little timber monastery, to begin with. Most of the stonework you see today was
constructed incredibly quickly over the first hundred years or so of the monastery's life.
It had become one of the largest and richest monasteries in the country, certainly the
biggest of the Cistercian order. At its peak, there were perhaps six or seven hundred people
living on-site, which was the size of a decent sized town in medieval times. But all that came
to an end of course in october 1539 when Henry VIII closed the monastery and sent the monks away.
In Tudor England, it was a pretty dangerous thing to show too much interest in former monasteries
and everybody forgot sometimes even where monasteries had been,
really. really quickly. So for over 300 years archaeologists and historians
have been trying to rediscover how monasteries worked, how they operated.
I've been working here for 32 years myself and I find out something new about the place most days,
which is a real pleasure, but we were sort of held back at the beginning by a feeling that by about
1900 the archaeology of Fountains had pretty much been done. What we're discovering now is that's
a long way from the truth and incredibly interesting new things still to work on.
Well, this is one of those parts of a site that's not been looked at as intensively as the other,
people kind of thought it was easy and well understood. This area outside the east end of
the abbey church is the monk's cemetery and where the lay brothers would have been buried as well.
Logical place outside the east end of the church and tucked in neatly in the angle
between it and these buildings over here, which are the monastic infirmary where
old monks lived and those who are ill were treated.
We're really fortunate to live in an amazing age where there's lots of new technological tools
becoming available to archaeologists and we've looked at this area with one of the latest
ground penetrating radar working in collaboration with our friends
at the University of Bradford and at Mala UK.
And what we've been able to do is use the instrument to look beneath the ground surface and
to map hundreds really thousands of burials that are in this area and the way they're organised,
the way they're structured is completely unexpected and it's telling us completely
new stories about the history of the abbey and how the monks lived here.
But most important;it's connected us back,
it's put the monks back in the picture. You kind of feel like they left
this place but they didn't, they're still here - they've never left, it's just we can see them now.
What the work out here in the cemetery has shown us
is the enormous potential that there still is around the Abbey and we've taken the
techniques we've used here and applied them in some other parts of the complex as well.
The early results are really exciting and we're looking forward to taking the research further.
And we're discovering so much more about the
archaeology at the moment when we never needed the information more.
Now that we can see how rich the surviving archaeology is we're going
to start to address the challenges that it might face as a result of
climate change; things like the River Skell flooding much more frequently.
Will it erode this site, will it damage its archaeology?
Those are things we can start to think about and to plan to prevent.
So the National Trust doing its level best to preserve this archaeology for future generations.
Thank you so much for all of your support.
If you weren't supporting the National Trust
then we couldn't care for beautiful places like Fountains Abbey,
much less make investments in discovering its secrets.