The first abbey at Buckfast was founded in 1018, possibly by Aethelweard, Earl of Devon, as a Benedictine monastery on the bank of the River Dart where it flows out of Dartmoor. The community changed hands and orders over the centuries - it became Savignac in the 12th century, then Cistercian when the Savignac order was absorbed in 1147. Cistercian abbeys traditionally dedicated their entire church to Mary, and Buckfast did. In the medieval period the abbey grew rich on Dartmoor sheep. By the 14th century it owned 17 manors across south Devon, town houses in Exeter, fisheries on both the Dart and the Avon, and a country house at Kingsbridge for the abbot. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 valued it at £466 - still wealthy by the standards of English abbeys. When Henry VIII's commissioners arrived in 1539, the last abbot Gabriel Donne surrendered the building on 25 February. The crown took 1.5 tons of gold, gilt, and silver to the Tower of London. The site passed to Sir Thomas Denys of Holcombe Burnell, who stripped the buildings and reduced them to ruins. Then the local people used the stones to build other things, for the next 300 years.

The six French Benedictines who arrived in 1882 took possession of the site and the Victorian country house that had been built on it. They reinstated monastic life almost immediately. They had no money for professional builders, and in any case were trying to rebuild the abbey to a specific medieval plan that would faithfully follow the footprint of the old Cistercian church. So the monks did it themselves. They mixed mortar. They cut stone. They hauled it up wooden scaffolding held together with rope. There were no hard hats, no safety harnesses, no fall protection of any kind. One monk fell 50 feet from the scaffolding and survived. In 1931 three monks fell from a hoist together and were all unhurt. Construction continued through the First World War - some of the monks were German nationals, and were allowed to stay on the condition they remained confined to the abbey grounds. The church was finally consecrated in 1932 and the bell tower completed in 1938. The total construction time was 56 years.

Buckfast supports itself. The abbey has a farm where the monks keep pigs and cattle, grow vegetables, and run a kitchen garden. They sell honey, beeswax, fudge, and pottery in a shop. They run a restaurant called the Grange in the precinct. Their most successful and most controversial product is Buckfast Tonic Wine - a fortified wine with high caffeine content that the monks began making in the 1890s. Police Scotland in particular has linked the drink to anti-social behaviour and now attaches anti-crime labels to bottles in some areas; the abbey has employed a youth worker in one affected area. The wine has been the subject of comedy songs and serious public-health debate. None of which started as the monks' intent. The other monastic enterprise was beekeeping. In 1919 a young German monk named Brother Adam, born Karl Kehrle, was placed in charge of the abbey's apiary just as a disease called Acarine wiped out 30 of the 46 colonies. The surviving hives were Italian queens; Brother Adam crossed them with stock from Crete, Morocco, and the Sahara to create what is now called the Buckfast bee, a disease-resistant strain that has been used to restock apiaries across the British Isles and Europe. Brother Adam died in 1996 at the age of 98. He spent 77 years with the bees. In 2017 the abbey installed a new pipe organ by the Italian firm Fratelli Ruffatti - 5,537 pipes, with a striking Pontifical Trumpet en chamade jutting horizontally from the west gallery casework. It was the first Ruffatti organ in the United Kingdom.

Buckfast in 2020 had 13 monks. The community has been smaller than the heroic numbers of the rebuilding years for a long time. The abbey runs a conference centre. The hair shirt of Saint Thomas More - the Lord Chancellor of England who refused to recognise Henry VIII's break with Rome and was executed in 1535 - is enshrined for veneration at a side altar. In 2018 the abbey hosted the Millennium Bell Ringing Festival to mark a thousand years since the original foundation. The choir sings the Mass and Vespers. The bookshop sells theology and the same beeswax candles the monks have been making for a century. The story of Buckfast is not really about the medieval abbey - that one is mostly gone. It is about what it means to build a thing on faith, knowing you will not see it finished, and what kind of community keeps that building useful generations later. The Benedictine vow includes stabilitas - stability, the commitment to remain in one place. The monks have remained. The building they made still rises above the river, and the river still flows out of Dartmoor toward the sea.