Catholic and Loving it!

As Mark Shea said when he was here. We live in England.

England is full of history, back in the day (before the reformation) we had monks. Loads and loads of monks. Here in the North of England was particularly monk heavy because after the Norman conquest William the Bastard basically had his guys trash everything and kill everybody so that in the Domesday Book all the villages are described as wasta est (wasted).

William (aka the Conqueror) gave his favourite lords great swathes of land in the north and those guys carried on living down south because the land up north was basically useless (with no peasants, cows or anything). The lords lead lives of debauchery and then pooped themselves about what would happen to them when after they died. They struck deals with various monks from France saying "If you can get me in to heaven I will give you huge tracts of wilderness to build monasteries on" and since monks love huge tracts of wilderness (it's quiet) they said "it's a deal". Over the years house prices rose and the monks grew very wealthy until Henry VIII said "Hey, that looks valuable, I'll have that..."

The land in Hull was pretty much all owned by two groups of monks. The Cistercians at Meaux and the Augustinian Canons at Haltemprice. Michelle thought it would be a cool idea to take the Youth Group to visit the latter for night prayer at the end of this, um, whatever Youth Groups have... terms? Anyway, we took a walk up there this evening to do a bit of reccy and risk assess it check it's all safe.

We took a look online before going and found a great site about the priory here, so we knew that there was nothing of the priory to actually see. What there is, is a farmhouse which is pretty damn old and has some parts that may be contemporary to the priory itself. Better than Skipsea Castle.

The recent updates are a bit of a concern, it's the usual tale. A listed building that's too historically significant let somebody do something useful with it (like do it up) and not historically significant enough to take care of properly (build a visitor centre etc). So it stands there, crumbling. I can see why English Heritage hesitate to allow somebody to turn it in to a house, I've seen some lovely historic buildings trashed by people turning them in to houses. On the other hand, if English Heritage can't afford to look after it, surely it's better to let somebody do it up and live in it and hope for the best. The current state of affairs is going to leave us with a field.

You can see a picture of the farmhouse in 1998 here. Here's my pictures today, ten years later...

As you can see, quite a lot of the building has been lost in only ten years. Fortunately, quite a bit remains (for now). I trespassed a little bit through a rather large gap in the fence (you could drive a car through it) to get this photo of the other side. From this side you can see the stonework (at the bottom) which may have been contemporary with (and maybe even part of) the abbey.

Older OS maps also show a "Lady Well" to the north. We decided to go and check it out but we couldn't find anything, the field was too overgrown to really look for it and you're not really supposed walk around people's fields.

I really hope something can be done to save what remains of this site for future generations. It's not Buckingham Palace, but the site has great significance for the history of our local area. What would be ideal is for a millionaire to come and buy it and convert it in to some kind of Catholic retreat centre with visitor centre and resident monks. They could mark out the location of the old abbey and people could worship there once more. That would be amazing. But I'd be well happy just to find the next time I walk up there that somebody has fixed the walls, put a roof on top and is living there and occasionally checking the more ancient stonework hasn't crumbled too much.

As we left, I hoped that when Leona is old enough to look at these things, there will be something left for her to look at...

Come on English Heritage. We're members and we even visited Thornton Abbey. Get this farm sorted out.