Of course when there is such a garden as the one at Mount Grace you have to get the macro lens in full swing on the camera, it would be rude not to. 🙂 My 60mm macro does quite a good job I think. And this ends my outing to the priory, a lovely day for me to remember and fun to be out with Sophie. Hope my WPeeps have had a good weekend, am off to Scotland to work tomorrow, hope to get a few views through the camera 🙂 laters gaters 😉
After we visited the house and the priory we explored the estate which has a beautiful garden and also area with a lake and wildflowers. you can maybe tell I quite liked the Japanese maples! Further out from the beautifully kept gardens, is a kind of wilderness area where we saw geese and duck families.. It was at this point I knew I had to purchase a longer zoom lens!! These shots are all taken with the 18-55mm kit lens. You can see the babies better if you click on the pictures. Next time will be the last trip to MGP,…
More from my trip to Mount Grace Priory- after it’s dissolution it fell into ruins, but the priory guest house was left to form the nucleus of a residential house. It passed through many hands and I’ll spare you that part of the history and all the names through the 200 years, but then Sir Isaac Lothian Bell bought the estate in 1898, and with his trusty architect MacDonald Pointer began sympathetic work on the house using traditional materials and techniques in the spirit of the Arts & Crafts movement, this was completed in 1901. The house passed through the…
Today we’ll have a look at bits and bobs around the grounds of the priory. The Inner court was occupied on 3 sides by service buildings. This is where they baked bread and brewed beer. The Gatehouse is the oldest building in the Inner Court built in about 1400, the gates though are modern. It did have an upper storey but that was dismantled during renovations to the guest house next to it. There is a beauty of a Yew tree (think it’s a Yew) in the Inner Court.. and I could walk right inside it In the North East Corner of…
Mount Grace Priory has a reconstructed cell which was quite fascinating as it was so big! I always thought of Monks cells as little rooms in a dormitory with a bed and washbowl and that’s about it. Maybe other types of Monks did but Carthusian Monks lived a very solitary existence as their whole purpose was total withdrawal from the world to serve god by personal devotion and privation. Food and drink were brought to them by lay brothers and passed through a hatch beside the door, without any communication. The cell was rebuilt by Sir Lothian Bell between 1901…
Ok ready for more History? Mount Grace lay on the medieval road from York to Durham. (my posts re: York start HERE) It is the best preserved of the ten Carthusian Monasteries in England. Founded in 1398 by Thomas de Holland, Duke of Surrey & nephew to King Richard 2nd and then refounded in 1415 by Thomas Beaufort, Earl of Dorset and later Duke of Exeter, it was the last monastery established in Yorkshire before the Reformation (the part of our history where Henry VIII & Thomas Cromwell had them all pulled down). Unlike other monks who lived communally the Carthusians lived…
