Bordesley Abbey was founded in 1138 by Waleran de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, a Norman nobleman with extensive English estates. He invited Cistercian monks from Garendon Abbey in Leicestershire to come and settle the marshy valley of the River Arrow, just upstream from the modern town of Redditch. England in 1138 was sliding into the long civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, often called the Anarchy. After Stephen's catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, Waleran read the room and switched sides; he made his peace with Matilda, who then claimed the patronage of Bordesley as a royal house. The abbey therefore began life as the gift of a powerful private patron and, within three years of its founding, became a property of the Crown.

The Cistercians were the white-robed reformers of medieval monasticism, committed to remote sites and physical labour. The valley they were given at Bordesley was, by all accounts, mostly marsh. The first task was to drain it - to dig leets and channels, to divert the Arrow into a new course, to raise the abbey's working precinct above the floodplain. The earliest buildings were timber. Within a decade or so the monks were laying stone. The church was complete around 1150. Construction continued in five distinct phases up to the early 14th century, when a major collapse of the central tower forced a substantial rebuilding. The cloisters were finally rebuilt in the late 14th century. The whole western side of the church, embedded in the slope of a hill, had to be propped with buttresses against ground that kept wanting to slip.

By the early 13th century Bordesley was running an agricultural network of about twenty granges - outlying farms worked by lay brothers and hired labour - spread across Worcestershire and Warwickshire as far as 35 kilometres from the abbey itself. They grew cereal. They raised vast numbers of sheep. The wool flowed into the European trade. The abbey grew rich and politically important: it held the ancient township of Tardebigge under its lordship, and it became the burial place of Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick, in 1315 - the same earl who had taken a leading role in the execution of King Edward II's favourite, Piers Gaveston, three years earlier. A west-end gatehouse was added in the 13th century, with a parish chapel dedicated to Saint Stephen, where local people could worship without entering the strict monastic precinct.

On 17 July 1538, Bordesley's last abbot, John Day, signed the deed of surrender that handed the abbey over to King Henry VIII's commissioners. Two months later, on 23 September, the Crown sold the land. In 1542 it passed to Lord Windsor; the Earls of Plymouth then held it for the next four centuries. The demolition was thorough. Stone was carted away for other buildings or burned for lime. The Saint Stephen chapel at the west gatehouse - which had served as the local parish church - survived the Reformation and went on being used by ordinary worshippers until 1805, when a new church was built in the centre of Redditch and the chapel itself was finally pulled down. Bordesley had outlived its own dissolution by 267 years before the last piece of its medieval fabric came off the ground.

In 1969 the University of Reading's 'Bordesley Abbey Project' began a programme of careful excavation that has continued, year after year, ever since. They have traced the church, the cloisters, the chapter house, the lay-brothers' range. They have uncovered tiled pavements with their patterns intact, fragments of stained glass, monastic seals, the burials of monks and benefactors. The site is owned today by the borough of Redditch and is open to the public; the on-site visitor centre is paired with the Forge Mill Needle Museum next door, which tells the rather different story of Redditch's later identity as the centre of the British needle-making industry. The abbey's ground plan is marked on the grass. The hills and hollows make sense once you know what is underneath them.