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The tannery
It was in the tannery that leather was made from animal skins. This was a long, hard and smelly process, and it is surprising that the tannery at Rievaulx should have been located so near to the dormitory and other buildings where the monks lived and worked. The stench must have been terrible. This tannery at Rievaulx had three bays and was tiled; surviving vats can now be seen here, close to where the monks’ reredorters and dormitory once stood. It is not known when exactly the tannery was moved here, but this may have occurred in the early fifteenth century when the monks’ dormitory was shortened. [see Williams, Cistercians in the Early Middle Ages, p. 207; Coppack, ‘Rievaulx and Fountains Abbeys: the interface between estates and monastery’, p. 424] |
