Finally, we got to visit the Abbey.
The monks of the Cistercian order settled in this area from France in 1131. The Abbey was founded by Walter fitz Richard de Clare - lord of Chepstow - in what was then an isolated part of Wales. He gifted the land to the monks who established themselves as an agrarian order. This complex of buildings was started during the 1200's and consecrated in 1301.
What is must have been like in it's heyday I can only imagine. As a ruin it is so imposing but also so beautiful and eerily atmospheric. The site is managed by Cymru, the Welsh National Trust organisation.
A busload of tourists arrived at the same time as we did, but once you were through the gate, you hardly noticed them, not something you can usually say about bus tours.
Back to the history - after the Black Death in 1348 - 1349, the numbers of monks dropped dramatically and by the end of that century there were only 15 living in the Abbey. Even so, they maintained there faith and lifestyle until Henry VIII dissolved all the monastaries of England and Wales between 1536 and 1540. The roofs were removed, the buildings stripped of all valuable materials and the site abandoned and allowed to fall into decay.
And there it lay, almost forgotten, until the late eighteenth century when it was rediscovered by artists, poets and tourists brought in by a new road and then the railway in 1876.
The Abbey was purchased by the Crown for the nation in 1901.
We spent a couple of hours just ambling around, gawking at the immensity of the walls and sitting in the sun which had eventually come out. It is a place that invites contemplation, even all these hundreds of years after it was first built.
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