Our drive today took us from Wells to Chipping Campden. We did this via a little detour to the River Wye, which marks the border between Wales (Monmouthshire, on the west bank) and Englan (Gloucestershire, on the east bank). While everything we say in Tintern was in Wales, it’s all within sight of England – just over the river.
This land is lush, mellow, and historic. Local tourists brochures explain the area’s special dialect, its strange political autonomy, and its oaken ties to Trafalgar and Admiral Nelson (the wood for their boats came from the Forest of Dean). This valley is home to the legendary Tintern Abbey, the ruined skeleton of a glorious church that’s well worth a look around.
Inspiring monks to prayer, William Wordsworth to poetry, J. M.W. Turner to a famous painting, and tourists like us to a thoughtful moment, this verse-worthy ruined-castle-of-an-abbey merits a visit. Founded in 1131 on a site chosen by Norman monks for its tranquility, it functioned as an austere Cistercian abbey until its dissolution in 1536.
The monks followed a strict schedule. They rose several hours after midnight for the first of eight daily prayer sessions and spent the rest of their time studying, working the surrounding farmlands, and meditating.
Dissolved under Henry VIII’s Act of Suppression in 1536, the magnificent church moldered in relative obscurity until tourists in the Romantic era (late 18th century) discovered the wooded Wye Valley and abbey ruins. J.M.W. Turner made his first sketches in 1792, and William Wordsworth penned “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey…” in 1798.
With all the evocative ruined abbeys dotting the British landscape, why all the fuss about this one? Because few are as big, as remarkably intact, and as picturesquely situation. Most of the external walls of the 250-foot long, 150-foot-wide church still stand, along with the exquisite window tracery and outlines of the sacristy, chapter house, and dining hall. The daylight that floods through the roofless ruins highlights the Gothic decorated arches – in those days a bold departure from Cistercian simplicity.
This is a place that is best to simply stroll the cavernous interior and let your imagination roam, like the generations of Romantics before you.
