I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of Furness Abbey before we were planning our trip to Barrow in Furness in Cumbria in September. Barrow is an industrial area nowadays but 900 years ago when the Abbey dates from it was obviously rural with the abbey being fabulously wealthy, owning a huge amount of land. Although it’s just a few miles outside the modern town of Barrow it still feels very rural.
The abbey was of course wrecked on the orders of Henry VIII at the time of the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1537. As you can see there’s some seriously heavy metalwork propping up some of the walls in the photo below.
There’s still a lot to see though and the ruins attracted the Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth.
With the arrival of the railway in 1847 it became a popular destination for tourists. If you look carefully at the photo below you can just see the top of a train going past, so it must have been easy for travellers to get to the abbey.
In the photo below you can still see the burn which supplied water to the abbey, presumably that is why it was situated here.
There’s a lot to see at Furness Abbey and as you can see we were lucky with the weather.
It’s definitely worth a visit if you are in that part of Cumbria. I was very pleasantly surprised at how scenic the Barrow in Furness area is and it’s not that far from the Lake District if you want to brave the hordes of modern day tourists!
Dissolution by C.J. Sansom was first published in 2003 and it’s the first book that I’ve read by the author, in fact it was only when I read his