The monks who founded Fountains Abbey arrived in 1132, a band of Benedictines from York who were unhappy with the laxity of their house and decided to follow the strict rule of the Cistercians. They settled in a wild, wooded valley beside the River Skell, with, as the chronicle says, nothing but thorn trees and rough stones, and over four centuries they built one of the richest and largest monasteries in England. Henry VIII dissolved it in 1539, and the ruins that remain, the great church with its soaring tower, the long cellarium and the cloister, are among the most beautiful in Europe. In the eighteenth century the owner of the neighbouring estate, John Aislabie, turned the valley into a water garden, so the ruins are now part of a designed landscape of ponds, canals and temples. UNESCO listed the whole ensemble in 1986.
The riding around Ripon is soft and green. The roads from Ripon to Fountains are flat and pleasant, but a short ride west brings you into Nidderdale, a quiet dale of stone villages, with a chain of reservoirs and moorland roads that climb in long, easy bends. Brimham Rocks, a field of strangely sculpted gritstone boulders, lies close to Pateley Bridge. Weekends in the dales are busy with cyclists, so look well ahead. The best months are May and September, when the light is clear and the hedgerows are in bloom.
Ripon has over sixteen thousand people, so fuel, food and rooms are plentiful. The city has a small cathedral with a Saxon crypt, and a lovely tradition that has run for more than a thousand years: every evening at nine, a man blows a great horn in the market square to set the watch. Pateley Bridge, with fewer than fifteen hundred people, is smaller but charming, and claims to have the oldest sweet shop in England.
Come early to Fountains, before the car park fills, and walk down the valley as the mist lifts off the water. The ruins glow in the soft light, and the sound of rooks echoes under the broken arches. You can feel why the monks chose this place, and why they stayed.