Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey stands roofless on a meadow at a bend of the River Wye, the water here marking the border between Wales and England, with wooded slopes rising steeply on both banks. Walter de Clare, lord of Chepstow, founded it in 1131 for monks sent from L'Aumône in France, making it the first Cistercian house in Wales and only the second in Britain. The order wanted its abbeys far from towns and castles, and the valley still gives a sense of that deliberate seclusion: the ruin is not approached so much as come upon, filling the floor of the gorge.

What survives is mostly the second abbey. The cloister and domestic ranges were rebuilt through the 13th century, and the great church went up between 1269 and 1301 with money from Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, whose arms were once set into the glass of the east window. It is a textbook of the Decorated Gothic style: a cruciform plan, an aisled nave of six bays, a four-bay presbytery and a west front whose seven-light window, completed around 1300, still holds much of its tracery. The stone is Old Red Sandstone, and the walls shift from purple to buff to grey as the light moves across them. The church runs about 228 feet from end to end, and with the roof gone the tall window openings frame sky and hillside instead of glass.

Monastic life ended on 3 September 1536, when Abbot Wych surrendered the house to Henry VIII's commissioners. The lead was stripped from the roof and sold, and decay began; within a few decades wireworks, furnaces and lime kilns had crowded into the valley, and workers' cottages were built against the old abbey offices. Out of that odd pairing of industry and ivy came the ruin's fame. From the mid-18th century the "Wye Tour" by boat made Tintern a set piece of the Picturesque: William Gilpin called it an enchanting piece of ruin, Turner painted it in 1794, Gainsborough, Girtin and Samuel Palmer came too, and Roger Fenton photographed it in 1858. Wordsworth's 1798 "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" made the name famous, even though the poem never actually describes the building.

Wander beyond the church to find the plan of monastic life laid out in low walls: a near-square cloister, the book room and sacristy, the chapter house where the monks met each day, the long dormitory range with its two-storey latrine, and an infirmary where later cubicles each received their own fireplace in the 15th century. The Crown bought the site in 1901, stripped away the romantic ivy for the sake of the masonry, and since 1984 it has been cared for by Cadw.

Getting there

The abbey lies beside the A466 in the village of Tintern, in Monmouthshire. The nearest railway station is Chepstow, about 7 km to the south, on the line from Cardiff towards Gloucester; bus route 69 between Chepstow and Monmouth stops around 300 metres from the entrance, and National Cycle Network Route 32 passes close by. Portishead, on the English side of the Severn estuary, is about 25 km away as the crow flies, and Bristol Airport (BRS) is about 35 km, reached by road over the Severn crossings. There is a pay-and-display car park next to the abbey.