Village of the Week: Where houses hardly ever come up for sale and is home to one of Yorkshire's greatest ruins

Early in the morning, and especially at this time of year, a wonderful mist hangs heavy in the air and often conceals the top of the Abbey ruins until the sun burns through enough.

With one narrow road running through the village, and the nearest main road a fair distance off, it means that rush hour buzz which seems to start earlier these days just isn’t there. Yet this most welcome silence isn’t completely silent.

A stream trickles below the village, you can hear the crackling of sticks and twigs in the woods as animals go about their daily business - rabbits, foxes, badgers, deer, rabbits amongst others.

Above ground, birds have been singing, tweeting and chipping away for hours and will do all day long into the evening and night.

That brings with it some stunning skies and this will be a village with minimal light pollution. Many areas of the North York Moors have low recorded levels and in fact, the village of Hawnby, just a short distance away, was in March this year said to be the first village to have switched to completely dark skies-friendly lighting.

It makes for a wonderful backdrop for the photographer looking for a dramatic shot as the sun sets and night falls.

For the locals there, it makes for a relaxing and peaceful end to the day.

For the cottages that are in the village, not one is the same as another. Most, if not all are Grade II listed, and after the crowds of visitors that do descend on Rievaulx to wonder at the Abbey and this village way of life that is almost like being in bubble of utopia, disappear, lamps glow at the windows and chimneys take the Autumn chill off with real fires.

Most of the houses in Rievaulx are built using stone from the abbey ruins, and the old watermill and miller’s cottage have both been converted for residential use – the former by an architect in the 1980s. The church, built in 1906, incorporates the gatehouse chapel for the Abbey.

The mill itself continued its operations until 1962, and its staff lived in the village, alongside estate workers such as foresters and gamekeepers or those who farmed nearby.

There is a Methodist chapel, WI, and village hall, but the cricket pitch and pub have been lost. The Earl of Feversham built a school in 1845 but it had closed by 1962. The former prime minister Harold Wilson used to holiday in the village as well apparently.

However, if you are, and why wouldn’t you be, wanting a corner of this heavenly hamlet of just 15 or so houses, then it is probably nigh on impossible.

The houses are mainly owned by the Duncombe Park Estate, rarely ever come for let and when one did come up for private sale last year - it was the first for years and years.

It was marketed in December and was said to be in need of renovation yet at that still had a guide price of £600,000.

Interestingly there was a covenant on the house that ruled it cannot be used as a holiday let.

The village of Rievaulx though, however, day to day life is now, is intrinsically linked to the spectacular ruins of the Abbey.

Rievaulx was an abbey of the Cistercian order, which was founded by St Bernard of Clairvaux at Cîteaux, near Dijon, France, in 1098.

Cistercian is a Catholic religious order of monks and nuns that branched off from the Benedictines and follow the Rule of Saint Benedict, as well as the contributions of the highly-influential Bernard, known as the Latin Rule.

The first buildings at Rievaulx were temporary wooden structures. In the late 1130s, William who was Rievaulx’s first Abbot, began the construction of stone buildings around the present cloister.

Rievaulx’s most famous abbot, Aelred, came to Rievaulx in 1134, and was elected abbot in 1147. By the time of his death in 1167 the community had doubled in size, having 140 monks and about 500 lay brothers. This increase in numbers required larger buildings – many of the standing buildings today date from Aelred’s rule.

Under a number of successors, work continued until Rievaulx Abbey was shut down on December 3, 1538, as part of the Suppression of the Monasteries that took place under Henry VIII in 1536–40.

By this time Rievaulx’s community had shrunk to just 23 monks. It was sold to Thomas Manners the 1st Earl of Rutland, who was closely associated with the royal court.

Rutland dismantled the buildings, reserving the roof leads and the bells for the king. Meanwhile, one of the buildings within the Abbey, that was called ‘the Yron Smiths’, was a water-powered forge used for making the many objects of iron required by a monastery, from nails to tools and cutlery.

Under Rutland the ironworks grew in scale – by 1545 enough iron ore was being smelted to keep four furnaces busy.

In 1687 the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, whose father, George Villiers, had acquired the Rutlands’ Yorkshire estates by marriage, sold the Rye Valley and many of Rievualx’s former estates to Sir Charles Duncombe and over the coming decades, Rievaulx Abbey became incredibly popular to visitors and art and architect enthusiasts.

However, by the beginning of the 20th century, the ruins were in a state of imminent collapse. Minor repairs were carried out in 1907, but the scale of the repairs needed was such that only state intervention could save the site. The Office of Works took the ruins at Rievaulx into guardianship in July 1917 and it is now managed by English Heritage.