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Fountains Abbey: History
Fountains Abbey: Buildings
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The Fountains legacy (16/33)
The landscape is today peppered with reminders of the agricultural and industrial activity of the Fountains community throughout the Middle Ages. Pits in the roads, made by the hooves of the monks’ packhorses, can be seen today at Pately Gate, where the road linking Fountains to Nidderdale and Craven was divided, and extended to Kirkby Malzeard. This was an important and well-used route for the community to access its granges.(63) Boundary crosses were often erected to indicate the road to travellers in bad weather. The base of one such cross, Lacon Cross, survives at Sawley. This marked the boundary of the road from Fountains’ grange at Warsill to the abbey precinct, via Butturton Bridge, which is another striking remnant of the monks’ industry. Butterton Bridge is massive stone structure, built by the community in the thirteenth century, to provide access to the abbey estates. Fountains built and maintained other bridges, for example, over the Rivers Colne and Calder, to reach their grange at Bradley, near Huddersfield.(64) The Cistercians’ contribution to the construction and maintenance of bridges in the North of England was noted by a Lincolnshireman, Robert Aske, at the time of the Dissolution: ...the
abbeys in the North … laudably served God …
Indeed, the mid-fifteenth-century ‘Bursar’s Book’ records that in Fountains contributed to repairing Kettlewell and Summer bridges.(66) The community was not always as public-spirited, and in the early fourteenth century the abbot refused to repair Bradley bridge, which had been broken down, ‘to the great peril of men and crossing.’ The abbot, who ultimately triumphed, argued that as the monks of Fountains had built this on their own initiative they were under no obligation to repair it.(67) A number of farms today occupy
the sites of Fountains’ former granges,
and make use of their medieval layout. Ninevah Farm in North Yorkshire,
for example, stands on the site of Fountains’ grange of Morker,
and the earthworks of the outer and inner enclosures are still visible.
Farms
also stand on Fountains’ former
granges of Arnford, Bouthwaite, Brimham, Cayton and Sutton.(68) Placenames
are another vivid and enduring reminder of Fountains’ impact on
the landscape. The field where Kirkby Wiske grange once stood is still
known
as ‘Grange
garth’, and ‘Smelthouses’ in Nidderdale, commemorates
the community’s lead-working industry, for Fountains had their
smelthouses here.(69) The community had
sheep-runs in the area today known as Fountains
Moor or Fountains Fell, which lies on the southern side of Pen-Y-Ghent. (70) |
