The history of Jervaulx Abbey

Jervaulx Abbey was founded in 1156, when a struggling Cistercian community originally established at Fors, further up the dale, was relocated to a more fertile site beside the River Ure. The name Jervaulx comes from the Norman French for the valley of the Ure, "Yore Vale", and the abbey went on to become one of the wealthiest religious houses in Wensleydale, its monks famous in particular for breeding horses on the surrounding pastures.

The abbey is also linked, by long local tradition, to the origin of Wensleydale cheese. The monks are said to have brought cheese-making knowledge from France and adapted it using local ewes' milk, producing a cheese that became closely associated with the dale and, much later, gave its name to the commercial Wensleydale cheese still made nearby today.

Jervaulx's end came suddenly and violently. Its last abbot, Adam Sedbergh, was implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the major 1536 uprising against Henry VIII's religious reforms, and was executed for treason in 1537. The abbey was dissolved soon afterwards and its stone plundered for local building projects, leaving the ruins that survive today.

What sets Jervaulx apart from the other great Yorkshire abbeys is what happened next, or rather what did not happen. While Fountains and Rievaulx were eventually cleared, consolidated and opened as managed heritage sites, Jervaulx remained in private hands and was never tidied up in the same way. The ruins have stood quietly crumbling and overgrown with wildflowers for almost five centuries, sheep grazing freely among the fallen stones, and the site is still privately owned today, with visitors admitted on an honesty-box basis rather than through a formal visitor centre, giving it a wilder and more intimate character than its better-known neighbours.