The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Mary the Virgin (Not confirmed)
Cistercian House, former
As well as describing the abbey church, this report contains general material, history and the full bibliography.
Further reports cover:
02 Cloister
03 Sacristy
04 Chapter house
05 Monks’ parlour
06 Monks’ dormitory and dayroom
07 Warming room
08 Refectory
09 Kitchen
10 W range and Lay brothers’ passage
11 Gatehouse
12 Loose sculpture
The ruins of the Cistercian abbey are within a public park, all owned and cared for by Leeds City Council. The park is large, yet smaller than the monastic precinct (see Hope and Bilson 1907, fig. 2). In the last few years the ruins have been enclosed by secure railings, and visitors now have access only during opening hours. The entrance is through the former lay brothers’ rere-dorter. Finds from recent excavations are sometimes on display.
The abbey was built in stone under the first abbot, Alexander, and his work survives as one of the best preserved 12thc monastic sites in England. Further buildings were added later, especially to the S and E, as well as guesthouses and other buildings in the outer court to the W. The first work remained largely unaltered except for the E window of the church, which may have collapsed, and was replaced in the 15thc by a tracery window. The roofs changed, and the tower was raised (Carter 2012). The E end of the chapter house was rebuilt in the 13thc (report 03), and the spaces on the S side of the cloister were re-arranged several times (reports 07-09).
The abbey remained in its initial ‘wilderness’ for centuries even after the Dissolution. The NW corner of the tower collapsed in 1779, but had been drawn by Moses Griffiths two years earlier; Turner sketched the block containing the monks’ dormitory and dayroom before its remaining vault collapsed. In the 18thc a thoroughfare passed through which meant that the nave and the wall below the E window of the presbytery had to be demolished (Sitch 2000); today the A65 passes through the park. Girtin and many other Romantic artists could still depict the abbey in a rural landscape, but c.1920 John Nash recorded the brick tide of Leeds advancing on smoke-blackened ruins in his ‘Millworkers’ Landscape’. The abbey was given to Leeds City Council in 1889 by Col. J. T. North; John Bilson’s 1890 Report on the Preservation of the Ruins of Kirkstall Abbey is published in Hope and Bilson (1907, 64-72). Major conservation works under J. T. Micklethwaite followed in 1892-96, after which the park beside the River Aire was opened to the public. The essential record of the abbey buildings is still Hope and Bilson (1907).
The stone used was Bramley Fall sandstone, which outcrops conveniently about a mile upstream from the abbey on the other bank of the River Aire. It is a hard stone which has proved structurally sound but it is very variable in grain-size and can be coarse, so not always suitable for sculpture. The size of isolated grains in walling or the bases of the nave arcades can be 10-20mm (Hope and Bilson 1907, 116; VCH Yorkshire II). Some capitals of the W doorway of the church and elsewhere must have used specially selected pieces to achieve the tiered ranks of fine upright leaves. In the Romanesque period, only the cloister arcades were in limestone.
The later medieval additions and extensions to the abbey’s buildings, less coherent than the works of the12thc, have been reduced to stumps or less. Original vaulting survives in the presbytery of the church, the nave aisles and the transept chapels, also in the chapter house. Many other ceilings were wooden; the transepts apparently had flat roofs, and the nave had a barrel vault. The walls are largely complete to full height, so there was even some idea in the late 19thc to re-roof the entire church and return it to use. The nave aisles have recently been roofed and restored to protect the vault; this additional work can be seen in views of the W facade, and of the S wall above the cloister. The small turrets on the corners of the major gables are not original and possibly 15thc (Hope 1907).
Photographic coverage is extensive in the article by Hope and Bilson (1907). The photographs, by Godfrey Bingley and others, were taken before the restoration. The Godfrey Bingley collection of photos (Leeds University Library, Special Collections) include many of Kirkstall Abbey. The amount of rebuilding on the W side of the crossing is apparent in Hope and Bilson (1907, fig. 13), a view E down the nave, and the works involved, for example, blocking or unblocking and rebuilding, some doorways. A century ago, great care was taken on the photography, and equally important for the results, the sculpture was then less weathered. The illustrations of the capitals to the transept chapels, for example, show that detail has been lost (Hope and Bilson 1907, figs 83, 85). Similar deterioration has occurred in the capitals of the W doorway (Hope and Bilson 1907, fig. 91). The many profiles of mouldings illustrated in their paper are a valuable resource.