Cars rattle through this narrow arch on the road from Oldstead, and hardly a driver spares it a glance. Yet this squeeze of stone is Byland Abbey‘s Inner Gatehouse, and in its day nobody passed through without good reason.
Getting into the monastery was never a casual affair. The whole precinct sat behind a high wall, most of which has long since vanished, and this gatehouse was the one door into that world. The arch split it into two vaulted porches, inner and outer, and a walled lane once ran here from the smaller outer gate. A sort of barbican. Follow this lane back a short way and you can still make out, to the north, the precinct wall’s old course crossing a great stone-banked dam.
Beyond the gatehouse lay a whole working village in miniature: guest houses, a mill, a granary, a forge, a bakehouse, a brewhouse, a dovecot, and a scatter of artificial ponds and dams that kept the whole operation running. These ponds were drained and left to the grass once the Dissolution came through and put a stop to the monks’ business.
Byland once stood shoulder to shoulder with Rievaulx and Fountains as one of the three great monasteries of the north, though it earned that place the hard way. Forty-three years of false starts and wrong turns went by before the community finally settled here for good. It began life over on the other side of the Pennines, founded from Furness Abbey in Cumberland under the reforming order of Savigny, and only became Cistercian when that order was folded into the larger one in 1147.
Source: Byland Abbey. English Heritage, 1999.
Leave a Reply