Leiston Abbey

Leiston Abbey stands in the fields west of Leiston in Suffolk, a ruined Premonstratensian monastery built after the original site near the sea was lost to flooding. Founded about 1183 by Ranulf de Glanville, Chief Justiciar to Henry II, it was first called St Mary de Insula on a marsh-girt island. After repeated flooding and a great fire in the 14th century, the canons moved inland and rebuilt the abbey under Robert de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk. The remains visible today belong to that second abbey, set in open farmland with the ruins framed by hedgerows and distant woods. The abbey’s history is recorded in unique documents. Its court of wreck rolls from 1378 to 1481 survive as an important historical source, while lists of abbots and late visitations appear in Premonstratensian records. After the Dissolution the estate passed to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who turned the abbey into a farm. A Georgian front was added to the farmhouse, later extended in the 1920s. In 1928 Ellen Wrightson bought the ruins and farm to use as a religious retreat, and on her death bequeathed them to the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. Visitors walk among the abbey’s substantial ruins, where the farmhouse is still built into the old walls. The site is managed by the Pro Corda Trust, a centre for training chamber musicians. English Heritage holds the guardianship of the ruins, which stand in quiet fields west of the road to Theberton. The open landscape around the abbey offers wide views over farmland and distant hedgerows, with the occasional sound of birds and the wind across the open ground.