There is no abbey at Rosedale Abbey. There is a stair turret, the last fragment of a small Cistercian nunnery founded by 1158 and closed by Henry VIII in 1536, and there is a village built partly from the priory's bones. Look closely at the garden walls along the lane and you find suspiciously well-carved lintels. The sheds have ashlar stone too well-cut for any farmer. Two of the village churches have circular windows, the Cistercian sign of dedication to the Virgin Mary, though Victorian builders probably copied the look rather than reusing original stone. The village remembers the nuns by name, even though almost nothing of theirs still stands.
Rosedale Priory was one of twenty-four nunneries in Yorkshire. The order itself, the Cistercians, was famously hostile to women, and houses for nuns could not be founded by the formal filiation that male Cistercian abbeys used to trace themselves back to the mother house at Citeaux in France. So Rosedale and houses like it existed in an awkward, semi-official position, partly connected to the broader order, partly improvising. What is known of the daily life comes from a handful of administrative records. One reprimand tells the sisters not to give so much in aid to the poor that they bankrupt themselves. Another warns them against allowing visitors into the dormitory. Another, perhaps the most affectingly human, warns them not to bring puppies into the church lest they disturb the service.
The nuns are credited as the first people to farm sheep commercially in the region, a quintessentially Cistercian practice. The order's founders had wanted to live far from the concourse of men, in remote valleys, and they discovered that sheep paid for the silence. Wool was the basis of medieval English wealth, and the great Cistercian abbeys, Fountains and Rievaulx among them, ran enormous flocks across the moors. The sisters at Rosedale operated at smaller scale, perhaps half a dozen to a dozen women in residence at any time, but the principle was the same. The Cistercians also reshaped the landscape itself, carefully managing water courses and laying out monastic granges. Some of that work is still visible in Rosedale's stream channels.
In 1536 the priory closed in the first phase of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. The buildings were left to decay, the property sold off. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the surviving stonework was gradually dismantled. The good stone went into garden walls, cottages, and a new church close to the priory church. The village we see today, St Mary and St Laurence's Church at its centre with stone houses radiating out, has the priory inside it in pieces, even if you cannot quite see where one ends and the other begins. Tourism has now become the main economy. Many smaller properties are holiday lets, and the Rosedale Show, founded in 1871, still draws around 5,000 visitors every August.
Rosedale's other history is industrial. In the nineteenth century the dale's geology gave up high-grade magnetic ironstone, and a mining boom transformed the valley. Between 1856 and 1926, ore was pulled out, processed in kilns built on the dale rim, and shipped out on a railway built around the top of the valley. The population of the dale rose from 548 in 1851 to nearly 3,000 at the peak. When the industry collapsed in the 1920s, the population went with it, and the dale returned to farming and sheep. The road called Chimney Bank, notoriously steep, runs out of the village south up the dale wall. It is named for an industrial chimney from the ironworks. The chimney itself was demolished in 1972, but the road still bears its name.
Rosedale Abbey is at 54.35 N, 0.88 W in the upper end of Rosedale, a long valley cutting north into the heart of the North York Moors. The village is a tight cluster of stone houses surrounded by open moor and grazed pasture. From the air it is small, but the Chimney Bank road climbing south makes a sharp diagonal line up the dale wall, easy to spot. Nearest airport is Teesside International (EGNV), about 35 miles north-west. Best viewing is from 2,500 to 4,000 feet AGL, ideally on an approach from the south showing the village set against the rising moor and the kiln ruins on the high rim above.
Rosedale Abbey is at 54.35 N, 0.88 W in the upper end of Rosedale in the North York Moors. Best viewed from 2,500-4,000 feet AGL. Teesside International (EGNV) about 35 NM north-west. The steep Chimney Bank road climbing south out of the village is a useful visual landmark, as are the 19th-century ironstone kiln ruins on the dale rim above the village.