Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire Moors, Anglophile Friday

This photo hangs on the wall of our 'Yorkshire Room'
These cloud photos were taken just after a downpour.

I know that some of you are probably weary of my photos of Rievaulx Abbey, but many of you are new to my blog since I last wrote about this, and you surely don't want to miss out on Rievaulx Abbey now, do you. Much of this post is a review for those of you who've followed Cranberry Morning quite a while.

Just a little aside here: Have you checked out Mike Biles' blog, Bit About Britain? If you're at all interested in British history, he's a pleasant must-read.  He regularly posts brilliant and witty essays about historically interesting places in the UK. Another great travel blogger from Britain is J_on_Tour who has lots of wonderful photos and blog posts with detailed information on places of interest - with a delightful bit of humor thrown in. So they're definitely the ones to go to if you want to actually learn something. (Be sure to tell them I sent you.)

Me? I'm the place to go on Fridays if you like to see lots of photos and an American tourist's perspective on England's castles, abbeys, cathedrals, churches, lanes, rivers, views, drystone walls, pubs, and sheep - with some London stuff thrown in now and then.

It was in the spring of 2003 (although I took most of the photos you see here in the spring of 2007) that I first set eyes on the haunting remains of Rievaulx Abbey on the North Yorkshire Moors. What an amazing, imposing structure! I tried to imagine what Rievaulx would have looked like in the 12th century when it was built and inhabited by Cistercian monks.

Some of the ideas used in planning the structure of the building, the part of the monastic complex you see in my photos, came from the European travels of Aelred, one of Rievaulx's most prominent abbots. Travel in those days was not by air or rail! Contrast Aelred with the people you know today who've never set foot outside the county in which they were born!

 A dozen or so of the 'white monks,' so named for the color of habit they wore, moved to northern England from France, for the purpose of spreading the Gospel to northern England and Scotland. They built on the thousand acres donated to the order by the lord of Helmsley Castle (subject for a later post), and by the mid 1100s at its peak, there were as many as 650 men living at Rievaulx.

Their economic business was raising sheep and selling wool, so the monastery was greatly impacted when disease decimated the flock. But the ultimate threat to the monastery was from Henry VIII, when he separated from the Catholic Church, declared himself head of the Church of England, and began the dissolution of the monasteries.

All of these photos were taken by me, although if you did a Google image search, you would find many similar photos for Rievaulx. I guess we're all impressed by the same things.

Having read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I always wonder if there was a stray monk who's up to no good.

Rievaulx Abbey, built to the glory of God - and without modern equipment! What a testament to the creative ability, i.e. imagination, reason, determination, organization, artistry, perseverance, etc. that God has given to mankind...

...which is almost terrifying when you think that it is just a vague shadow of the creative power the Creator Himself has - and without Whose creative and sustaining power we wouldn't be able to take another breath.

If you can stretch your imagination to see this trip route as a creature with three antennae, 
then Rievaulx Abbey is at the end of the eastern-most antenna.

Thanks to all of you who actually had the patience to wait for these images to load. I suppose I could have divided it into two posts...

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