Crowland Abbey

Crowland Abbey stands in the flat Fens near Peterborough, a Grade I listed parish church built on the remains of a great Benedictine abbey. The present building occupies what was once the north aisle of the medieval nave, its walls rising from the same ground where monks first gathered in the 8th century. A hermit named Guthlac came to the island in 699, and the community grew around his memory. The abbey held lands granted by a 10th-century abbot descended from an archbishop of York. Hereward the Wake once held land here, and in the 12th century Orderic Vitalis wrote a history of the house while staying as a guest. The abbey’s past reaches back to a time when it rang with the first tuned peal of bells in England. In 986 Abbot Egelric provided six bells, each given a name and rung together to produce harmony. A skull said to be that of Abbot Theodore, killed by Vikings in the 9th century, was kept here until stolen in 1982 and returned in 1999. The English Civil War left scars: Royalists garrisoned the ruins in 1642, and Oliver Cromwell’s forces took it the next year. The nave roof fell in 1720, and part of the south wall was removed in 1744. Visitors enter a plain parish church that preserves sections of the old abbey. The north aisle still serves as the place of worship, its arches and windows framed by centuries-old stone. A small two-manual organ stands at the west end, its pipes filling the space with quiet sound. Outside, Anchor Church Field shows traces of a high-status medieval hall uncovered in 2021, divided into three rooms with an added chamber. The churchyard holds war graves and the resting places of early saints and nobles. The longest bell ropes in England hang from the tower, once broadcast by the BBC in 1925.