The remains of a North Yorkshire priory is our Object of the Week. Once a Cistercian nunnery founded in about 1200, the site today survives as ruins and earthworks.

Ellerton Priory was founded about 1200, between Richmond and Reeth, and was clearly visible from the main road running along the dale.

It was a small Cistercian nunnery, enabling up to 13 nuns to live in a cloister around their church, with a small village nearby.

Although never wealthy, the nuns constructed an elaborate water supply, fed from a reservoir dug high on the south side of the dale, to sustain their community.

The priory functioned for more than three centuries before falling victim to Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536.

The remains of Ellerton Priory, a small Cistercian nunnery founded in Swal

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