Reading the Ruins of Kilbury Priory

To the casual visitor, the ruins of Kilbury Priory can seem little more than a pleasant jumble of grey walls in a meadow beside the River Kell. Most of the buildings were dismantled within a few years of the priory's closure in 1538, their stone carted away to build farmhouses, barns and even a stretch of the town wall, and in places nothing survives above knee height. Yet to those who know how to read them, the remains are remarkably eloquent. Medieval monasteries were laid out according to a pattern that varied little from one end of Europe to the other, and once that pattern is understood, the purpose of almost every fragment becomes clear. Kilbury was home not to monks but to a community of canons, priests who followed a monastic rule while also serving the parishes around them, but their daily routine, and therefore the arrangement of their buildings, differed very little from that of a conventional monastery.

The pattern began with the church, the spiritual and physical centre of monastic life. At Kilbury, the Priory Church occupied the whole northern edge of the site, and it remains the most complete structure, with parts of its west front still standing to their full height. The canons who lived here attended services in the church eight times a day, beginning in the early hours of the morning, and the other buildings were arranged so that they could reach it quickly and without going outdoors.

This was made possible by the Cloister, a square garden surrounded by covered walkways, which lay immediately south of the church. Each side of the Cloister was lined by a range of buildings with a particular purpose. The most important room in the east range, adjoining the church, was the chapter house, where the community met every morning to hear a chapter of their rule read aloud, discuss business and confess faults. Its carved doorway is one of the finest surviving pieces of sculpture at Kilbury. South of it, still in the east range, was the warming room, the only room apart from the kitchen where a fire was permitted, and where the canons were allowed to gather briefly to warm themselves in winter.

The canons slept in a dormitory on the upper floor of the east range, and a covered bridge connected it to the reredorter, the communal latrine block, which stood a little further east. Its position was carefully chosen: a channel diverted from the river ran beneath it, carrying waste away downstream. Archaeologists who excavated the channel in the 1970s recovered an extraordinary range of objects that had been dropped into it, from dice and broken spectacles to a small silver ring.

The south range, facing the church across the Cloister, contained the refectory, the large hall in which the community ate its meals in silence while one of the canons read aloud from a raised pulpit. Its tall windows suggest that it was once among the most impressive rooms in the priory. The Kitchen, which had to supply it, stood beyond its western end, in the south-western corner of the main complex, conveniently close to the Guest House, which formed the west range and provided accommodation for travellers, pilgrims and the occasional important visitor. Anyone arriving at the priory had first to pass through the Gatehouse, south of the Kitchen, where a porter decided who should be admitted.

Some buildings deliberately stood apart from the rest. The infirmary, where sick and elderly canons were cared for, lay to the east of the warming room, south of the latrine block and close to the river, separated from the main ranges so that infection would not spread and so that its residents could enjoy a quieter regime. To the south of the infirmary, the canons maintained a series of fishponds, rectangular pools fed from the river in which carp and other fish were bred. Since meat was forbidden on many days of the year, a reliable supply of fish was essential, and the outlines of the ponds can still be traced as shallow hollows in the grass.

The priory is now cared for by a heritage charity, which has recently replaced the old information boards with a guidebook that explains how each building was used. Its authors hope that visitors will leave not only with an image of picturesque ruins but with a sense of the disciplined, carefully ordered life that the buildings were designed to support.