Kirkstead Abbey

Kirkstead Abbey is a former Cistercian monastery in Kirkstead, Lincolnshire.

The monastery was founded in 1139 by Hugh Brito, lord of Tattershall, and was originally colonised by an abbot and twelve monks from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.

The abbey remained in existence until 1537, when it was dissolved; the last abbot, Richard Harrison, and three of his monks were executed by Henry VIII following their implication (probably unjustly) in the Lincolnshire Rising of the previous year.

The land passed to the Duke of Suffolk and later to the Clinton Earls of Lincoln, who built a large country house. By 1791 that too had gone and all that remains today is a dramatic crag of masonry - a fragment of the south transept wall of the abbey church - and the earthworks of the vast complex of buildings that once surrounded it.

ee also

* St. Leonard's Without (the 13th century chapel next to the abbey
* Woodhall Spa