The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Mary of Fountains (medieval)
Cistercian House, former
Fountains Abbey is about 3 miles SW of Ripon. The site is owned by the National Trust and maintained by English Heritage. The abbey and the contiguous water-gardens of Studley Royal are in the bottom of the deep valley of the river Skell; the main entrance is on a plateau, from which can be seen only the upper part of Abbot Huby's late medieval tower on the N transept. The site originally would have conformed to Cistercian foundation narratives, a place of rocks and trees, hidden from the world.
The abbey ruins are largely of the Romanesque period, although the tower, the eastern end of the church (the transept with the Chapel of the Nine Altars) and the monks’ infirmary complex to the E of the site are later. The mill also has structural parts of early date. There are plans of the abbey buildings in the 1970 (now out-of-print) DoE guide, Gilyard-Beer, 1970, and Coppack 1993. Aerial view in Coppack 1993, colour plate 1.
The present report describes the church, also three fragments of loose architectural sculpture in the 'porter's lodge' display and one capital in the mill, and gives information regarding material stored off-site. On our visit in 1999, stonework was displayed in the building near the Mill which is now (2015) a tea-room, and those pieces are no longer on display.
The parts of the church which are relevant to the twelfth-century corpus are the transepts, nave and galilee. For the use of the various parts, see Kinder 2002, 131-373. The church owes elements of its design to Rievaulx, and to Sawley. The aisles were vaulted, and the nave had a wooden roof. Despite breaks in building, and the conventional partitioning, the architecture of the nave is unified and impressive. It is thought it took about 20 years to complete, from the time of Abbot Richard (1150-70) to that of Abbot Robert of Pipewell in the 1170s (Coppack 1993, 36-43; Gilyard-Beer 1970, 29-30), or as Glyn Coppack also puts it, between the death of Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153 and his canonisation in 1174.
Robin Hood's Well is a water basin on the S path to the Studley Royal water-gardens. It had been dated by Gilyard-Beer to 1220-50, but many passers-by might suppose it to belong to the water-gardens phase and not be a medieval item at all. The spirals resemble those of the doorway in bay 11 of the S aisle of the church, and its label has a profile common round the cloister, hence, presumably, the twelfth-century date.