Founded in the early 12th century, Waverley Abbey was Britain’s first Cistercian monastery. The small monastic order prospered throughout the medieval period until the 1530s, when the abbey was shut down during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. After shuttering, it remained abandoned for centuries, though some of its stone was extracted and used in the construction of nearby homes. One such home, the Waverley Abbey House, was erected just a few hundred meters north of the abbey’s ruins and eventually converted into a hospital during World War I. Today…
