Postcard from Yorkshire: Fountains Abbey

After seeing Fountains Abbey, an eight hundred and something year old ruin of an Abbey complex, there is an argument that all places of worship should be open to the sky. This not only allows one to glimpse the wonder of God's creation at first hand but, crucially, allows God to keep an eye on those monks who claim to work in his name. Choirboys. Say no more.

The Abbey may be a ruin, but The National Trust manage to keep at least four tea shops fully functioning. These being Yorkshire teashops, they sell cakes. I had a scone roughly the size of a bus, with enough cream on it to clog the arteries of a mammoth. It was truly a thing of wonder, even if I could still feel it lodged in my lower intestine some hours later.

Luckily, the grounds provide plenty of opportunity to walk off the substantial delights of the tea shop. As well as the Abbey, there is a grand house. Not quite a stately home, rather the sort of unpretentious massive pile that wealthy farmers built and which were regularly visited by royalty. With grand houses come grand gardens, and as well as woods and so on, there were formal gardens with straight waterways, polite waterfalls, rustic bridges and, of course, a folly or feature at every turn.


The rich, it would appear, liked only one thing more than building grand houses and grand gardens, and that was building classically inspired mini-temples and castles, essentially vantage points where they could look out over their grand houses and grand gardens and, of course, indulge in a bit of secluded aristocratic rumpy pumpy with visitors. One of the follies, an octagon tower, even had an artificial cave built next to it which functioned as a kitchen allowing the servants to prepare hot food to keep visitors' strength up between bouts of walking and illicit fumblings in the ha-ha. Something suggests that the invention of the thermos flask could not come quickly enough for members of the toiling classes.

The Abbey complex itself is immense and beautiful. Soaring columns and arches make one wonder how on earth the place stays open to the public without being swaddled in yellow and white tape with 'keep out' or at least 'hard hat area' written on it. Rather, the place is a vast adventure playground for children who run around in a perpetual state of over-excitement, while adults ponder if they can pick up a foam sword from the gift shop and dash around the ruins playing knights.


The nearby church is still intact, modern (by comparison, St Mary's is Victorian), small (by comparison) and very beautiful. It's delights include a spiral staircase to the organ lift that would appear to per-date the work of Crick and Watson by some decades, and some particularly colourful stained glass windows. These are made even more remarkable because, due to a fault in the paint, some of the figures are losing their faces.


As a result what would normally be an ordinary pious looking bloke with a beard is a blank space and what was Victorian suddenly looks terribly modern. The windows are very beautiful and, when lit from without by the glorious Yorkshire sun, colourful. As they depict scenes from the bible, and hence are usually pretty gruesome, it occasionally takes one a second or two to realise that the fellow kneeling piously is not surrounded by people holding scones in anticipation of a cream tea, but is in fact about to be martyred. This is usually a process that involves something unpleasant.