The abbey is sited on the Maltby beck about two miles S of Maltby off the A634. The valley is steep-sided and narrow, but at Roche it widens out, allowing the church to be positioned close to the exposed rock on its N side and for the monastic buildings to spread across the flat land around the beck, bridging it in the characteristic fashion as at Fountains and Kirkstall abbeys.

Roche abbey was built to the standard Cistercian plan of the 12thc in local Lower Magnesian limestone (Harman and Pevsner 2017, with plan). The foundations of the abbey buildings are all clear to see, but the only substantial standing remains of our period are the arcades of the transept chapels and the return walls of the presbytery of the abbey church. These walls stand almost to their full height and are of national interest as they have early Gothic structural features that appear to date from 1170-85, in combination with Romanesque waterleaf capitals. The walls are also the earliest attempt by the Cistercian order at a three-storey elevation with rib vaults (Fergusson, p.12).

According to Fergusson’s plans (1990), all buildings of the abbey to the N of the Maltby Beck were built in the period 1170-80, apart from the (liturgical) east end of the chapter house and the screen across the nave, which are dated to the period 1181-1213. The recent guide (Fergusson and Harrison 2013) shows three phases for work north of the beck: 1170-85, phases 1 and 2; 1180-1200.

The chief surviving sculptural remains of the church are in one minor doorway, bases of the W doorway, nave arcades and crossing piers; the transept arcades; several courses of the screen separating monks and lay brothers; the occasional capital, and the vaulting corbels for transepts and presbytery.

This report includes the remains of the monastic precinct: the inner gatehouse, as well as the bases of vaulting in the chapter-house, and the E and W ranges.

The abbey was founded in 1147 by two neighbouring lords, Richard de Busli, lord of Maltby, and Richard, son of Turgis, lord of Hooton Levitt, on a 31-acre site in a narrow Magnesian limestone gorge on either side of the Maltby Dike. The house took the suffix of its name from a huge rock that was thought to resemble a cross-head and which in time became an object of pilgrimage.

'In 1189 Roche was one of ten Cistercian abbeys listed for indebtedness on account of over-ambitious expansion. The church and most of the claustral buildings were finished by the late 1180s; the rest were brought to completion under the long rule of the fifth abbot, Osmund (1184-1213).' (Fergusson 1990, 28).

The abbey was dissolved in 1538 when, according to the son of an eye-witness, 'All things of price' were 'either spoiled, carped [plucked] away, or defaced to the uttermost ... it seemeth that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could' (Fergusson 1990, 29).

In the 1770s the landscape was transformed by Capability Brown for the fourth Earl of Scarbrough of Sandbeck Park by covering up large areas of the ruins, planting trees and constructing terraces, parterres, ponds and waterfalls.

In the 1920s the Office of Works (the predecessor of English Heritage) undid Brown's work and the site assumed its present neat appearance.

Coloured surfaces

The visitor will notice the deep pink colouration on walls in the W range and on the N entrance to the gatehouse; lighter pink patches can be seen in the higher parts of the presbytery S wall; bases in the day-room and W range are blackened - yet all this is Magnesian limestone. Professor Mike Seaward of Bradford University supplies the following information from his recent survey of Roche Abbey: The pink stuff is most likely an alga, Trentepohlia, and the black stuff could be one or more lichens, especially Verrucaria, or indeed a cyanobacterium.

Stone benches

Similar benches survive at Kirkham Priory (East Riding) though not in the church.

Chapter house

The E pier is not just a clustered pier, but the plan view shows the waving in and out of the mouldings, something that occurs on a larger scale in the crossing piers of Ripon cathedral.

Inner Gatehouse

The gatehouse is dated by Fergusson (1990, 6) to the 1170s, contemporary with the earliest phase of building on the site, though he suggests that it was remodelled in the late 13thc. He claims that 'It is the most important early gatehouse of the [Cistercian] order to survive.' However, the website https://www.dhi.ac.uk/cistercians/roche/buildings/gatehouse/ claims that the gatehouse may date entirely from the 14thc, as does the current English Heritage guidebook (Fergusson and Harrison 2013). There seems to be little more than its foundations to place it in a definitely Romanesque context.