Helewise was a daughter of Ranulph de Glanville, Sheriff of Yorkshire and later Chief Justiciar to Henry II - one of the most powerful officials in twelfth-century England, the man who effectively ran the country in the king's name. She married Robert, Lord of Middleham, whose castle dominates the next valley to the north. Founding a monastery was an act of piety, dynastic memory, and political signalling all at once. The order she chose - the Premonstratensians, white-canon followers of St Norbert of Xanten - was a relatively new and reform-minded community in England, less famous than the Cistercians but operating on similar principles of austerity and remote location. The original site at Swainby is itself now a low green field with traces of its abbey in the ground; the move to Coverham in 1212 took the foundation deeper into the Yorkshire Dales.

The Wikipedia summary is honest about how little is known: there is some evidence the abbey and its holdings were attacked by Scots raiders during the first half of the fourteenth century, with the abbey itself virtually destroyed. Later in the same century a record names fifteen canons in residence plus the abbot - a small community even by medieval standards. The Scots attacks fit a broader pattern: after Bannockburn in 1314, raiding parties pushed deep into northern England, and Coverdale was within reach of the long ride south from the border. The abbey rebuilt, kept its lands, buried its patrons. Geoffrey le Scrope (1285-1340) and his wife Ivetta De Ros are recorded as buried at Coverham, along with Ralph Neville, 1st Baron Neville de Raby, and Ranulph Neville, 1st Baron Neville - lords of the great northern families whose castles ringed the Dales.

By the time the Dissolution arrived under Henry VIII, Coverham Abbey was a modest house with fewer than a dozen monks, its day-to-day lands managed by the monastic bailiff Edward Loftus - whose son Adam Loftus would later become Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Early in 1536, the king's receiver William Blytheman arrived with inspectors, assisted by the abbey's last seneschal Thomas Wraye and almost certainly by the bailiff Loftus, to search for misdemeanours, record rents, and compile an inventory of possessions. By April the abbot had been granted a pension, the monks offered the chance to recant their vows, and the monastery stripped of all value. The inventory mentioned 781 ounces of silver plate and 3 ounces of gold, along with six brass bells and all the lead from the roofs. Twenty years later what was left was sold to Humphrey Orme. The buildings began to fall, the carved stone was carried off, the orchards reverted to scrub.

Coverham today is a quieter place than even the medieval monks would have known. The principal surviving remains include the ruins of the church and the guesthouse, which were incorporated into two houses: Garth Cottage, and a second house built on the site in 1674. The 1674 house was replaced in the late eighteenth century by the building now known as Coverham Abbey House, a two-storey stone-and-slate-roofed home with a Doric doorway, fanlight, open pediment and sash windows on its south front - elegant, restrained, and with an older eastern range bearing a long Latin inscription that almost no visitor stops to translate. The ruins of the gatehouse stand at the entrance to the grounds, an arch of two chamfered orders flanked by buildings whose sides have been converted into barrel-vaulted animal shelters. The abbey ruins are a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a Grade I listed building - history made into a working farm, with the medieval still showing through wherever the modern roof gives way.