Bolton Priory: The beauty spot which is one of Yorkshire's most popular medieval religious houses
Perhaps the most visited of all Yorkshire’s medieval religious houses because of its picturesque location and proximity to Leeds and Bradford, Bolton Priory is sometimes referred to by the name of the nearby hamlet Bolton Abbey.
The community was founded in 1130 by a group of Augustinian cannons.
Supported by wealthy benefactors William de Romille and his wife Cecily, their original location was at Embsay, near Skipton, but in 1154 the monks were offered a new home overlooking a bend in the River Wharfe fives miles to the east, and began constructing their priory on land believed to have been the site of a Saxon chapel.
It took around 100 years to complete the full nave and transept, while other buildings which took shape included cloisters, domestic quarters and an octagonal chapter house.
There was once a central tower, but this is thought to have collapsed in the 14th century. Part of the main chapel was used as a parish church.
Bolton Priory was small compared to great Yorkshire abbeys like Fountains, Rievaulx and Kirkstall, but construction was never completed.
In 1520 its last prior, Prior Moone, commissioned the building of a western tower but it had risen only as high as the nave by the time the priory was closed in 1539 as part of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Plans which later came to light indicated it would have been three times as high and Alexander Hamilton Thompson, a 20th century professor of medieval history at Leeds University, wrote that if it had been completed the tower “would have had few parallels in England”.
The parish church was later restored, while the priory ruins became a famous beauty spot, sketched by the artist J.M.W. Turner and visited by the poet William Wordsworth and author Charlotte Brontë.