Mount Grace Priory, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Mount Grace Priory was built in 1398 for the Carthusian monks (a silent order). The Priory was dissolved by Henry VIII and a manor house was built around its ruins. In the 20th century it became an Arts and Crafts style county house. Today the house, priory ruins and gardens are open to visitors.

Address

Cleveland Way, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom

See all sites in North Yorkshire

Details

Founded: Middle Ages
Category: Religious sites in United Kingdom

More Information

www.english-heritage.org.uk
en.wikipedia.org
www.worldwidewriter.co.uk

Rating

4.6/5 (based on Google user reviews)

Interesting Sites Nearby

Merchant Adventurers' Hall (49,3 km)
City of Troy Maze, Dalby (31,9 km)

User Reviews

Matti Walker (12 months ago)
My little boy loved finding butterflies with the bug catching tools they provided! The priory is s really interesting place with a lot of history!

B Hepworth (12 months ago)
Wonderful place to spend a peaceful day out. Staff are very friendly and helpful. Nice new tea room and a beautiful setting for the house and priory. The gardens and pond were stunning. Very enjoyable visit! We'll be returning again.

annf williams (12 months ago)
Lovely old house, first impression was that it would make a beautiful watercolour ( I'm quite arty

Sean J Connolly (12 months ago)
Lovely hidden gem, English Heritage do an amazing job of looking after this place. We are actually National Trust members but you can get in at no cost for being an NT member. You get to see what life was like for these monks and when they say they spent their days living in solitude in a thing called a cell, its not anywhere near as bad as you think. Pay a visit and check it out. One thing to remember is parking is £1 and that goes both for English Heritage and NT members alike.

Leigh Edmondson (12 months ago)
We love Mount Grace Priory! It's perfect for curious kids who want to explore all the nooks and crannies. Lovely gardens, activities for the kids and a good coffee shop.

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Photo from Flickr, copyright Frans.Sellies

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Kromeriz Castle and Gardens

Kroměříž stands on the site of an earlier ford across the River Morava. The gardens and castle of Kroměříž are an exceptionally complete and well-preserved example of a European Baroque princely residence and its gardens and described as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first residence on the site was founded by bishop Stanislas Thurzo in 1497. The building was in a Late Gothic style, with a modicum of Renaissance detail. During the Thirty Years' War, the castle was sacked by the Swedish army (1643).

It was not until 1664 that a bishop from the powerful Liechtenstein family charged architect Filiberto Lucchese with renovating the palace in a Baroque style. The chief monument of Lucchese's work in Kroměříž is the Pleasure Garden in front of the castle. Upon Lucchese's death in 1666, Giovanni Pietro Tencalla completed his work on the formal garden and had the palace rebuilt in a style reminiscent of the Turinese school to which he belonged.

After the castle was gutted by a major fire in March 1752, Bishop Hamilton commissioned two leading imperial artists, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, arrived at the residence in order to decorate the halls of the palace with their works. In addition to their paintings, the palace still houses an art collection, generally considered the second finest in the country, which includes Titian's last mythological painting, The Flaying of Marsyas. The largest part of the collection was acquired by Bishop Karel in Cologne in 1673. The palace also contains an outstanding musical archive and a library of 33,000 volumes.

UNESCO lists the palace and garden among the World Heritage Sites. As the nomination dossier explains, 'the castle is a good but not outstanding example of a type of aristocratic or princely residence that has survived widely in Europe. The Pleasure Garden, by contrast, is a very rare and largely intact example of a Baroque garden'. Apart from the formal parterres there is also a less formal nineteenth-century English garden, which sustained damage during floods in 1997.

Interiors of the palace were extensively used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace during filming of Amadeus (1984), based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who actually never visited Kroměříž. The main audience chamber was also used in the film Immortal Beloved (1994), in the piano concerto scene.

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Mount Grace Priory