Tintern Abbey

Listen first. Beneath the voices of other visitors, there is the low sound of the River Wye, moving brown and steady past the meadow. Rooks call from the wooded slopes. Look up, and the great stone arches open straight onto the sky. There is no roof here, no glass in the windows, only grey and rose-coloured stone framing clouds. You are standing inside a church that has been open to the weather for almost five hundred years.

This is Tintern Abbey, a few miles north of Chepstow, in the deep valley where Wales meets England. The river beside you marks the border. The far bank is England, and the near bank is Wales. For centuries this quiet bend in the river held one of the largest religious houses in the country. Today the abbey is cared for by Cadw, the Welsh government's heritage service.

The story begins in 1131. A Norman lord named Walter de Clare, who held Chepstow, invited a group of monks to settle here. They came from a monastery in France. They belonged to the Cistercians, a strict order of monks who wanted a simple life of prayer and hard work, far from towns. Tintern was the first Cistercian house in Wales, and only the second in all of Britain.

Why this valley? The Cistercians looked for remote places with fresh water, good land, and few distractions. The Wye gave them all three. It gave them fish, power for mills, and a road for boats. The steep, wooded hills closed off the outside world. The monks rose in the night for prayer, ate simple food, and spent long hours in silence. The building around you was designed for that rhythm of life.

Here is the first surprise. The church you see is not the original. The first Norman church was small and plain. In the late thirteenth century, the monks rebuilt it on a much grander scale. A powerful patron, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, supported the work. The new church took about thirty years to complete, and it was finished around 1301. Very little of the earlier building survives above the ground.

The new church was built in the Gothic style. Gothic architecture uses pointed arches, tall pillars, and large windows filled with stone tracery, which is the lace-like pattern of carved stone that once held the glass. Turn towards the west end and look at the great west window. The delicate tracery is still largely there. When the glass was in place, the evening sun came through it and lit the whole length of the nave.

Now turn around and face the east end. Here the great east window is a huge empty frame. Most of its tracery has fallen. One tall central shaft of stone still rises through the middle. It divides the sky in two. This was the end of the church nearest the high altar, the most sacred part of the building. Even in ruin, the sense of height pulls the eye upward.

The second surprise is under your feet and around you. Most monasteries placed their cloister, the covered walkway where monks read and walked, on the sunny south side of the church. At Tintern, the cloister sits on the north side. The reason is practical. The ground slopes down towards the river, and the drains and water supply worked best on that side. Walk through to the cloister and you will see the outlines of the monks' daily rooms.

Around the cloister you can trace the life of the community. There was a chapter house, where the monks met each day. There was a dormitory upstairs, a dining hall, and kitchens. Tintern also had lay brothers, men who took simpler vows and did much of the farm work. In the north transept, look for traces of the night stair. Monks came down these steps from their dormitory, in darkness, for the first prayers of the day.

In 1536, everything changed. King Henry the Eighth broke with the Church of Rome and began closing the monasteries of England and Wales. Tintern was among the first to go. The monks left. The estate passed to a local lord, the Earl of Worcester. The valuable lead was stripped from the roof and melted down. Without its roof, the church began its long life as a ruin, slowly taken over by ivy and weather.

By the eighteenth century, the ruin had found a new audience. Travellers came by boat down the Wye on what became known as the Wye Tour. They wanted wild scenery and romantic ruins, and Tintern gave them both. Artists painted it, including the young J. M. W. Turner. In 1798, the poet William Wordsworth wrote one of his best-known poems here, with a title that names Tintern Abbey. Yet the poem itself never describes the abbey. It is about the river and the hills.

The ruin you see today is also the work of careful hands. In 1901 the Crown bought the abbey, and the government began to repair it. Workers removed much of the thick ivy that visitors once loved, because the roots were breaking the stone. They strengthened walls and arches so the building could stand safely. So the clean outlines in front of you are partly the result of a century of quiet conservation, not just centuries of neglect.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment in the nave. Notice the colours in the stone, grey, pink, and soft purple, changing as the light moves. Notice how the open windows frame the green hills. As you walk back towards the road and the river, look over your shoulder once more. The arches are still there, as they have been for more than seven hundred years, holding the sky.