The ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Buildwas are sited on the S bank of the River Severn, in a wooded landscape between the Wrekin to the N and the Shropshire Hills to the S. In terms of modern settlement it is 10 miles SE of Shrewsbury. The abbey precinct may have covered up to 34 acres (Robinson 2002), and was bounded to the N by the Severn. What remains today is the abbey church and the claustral buildings to N of it. Of these the buildings of the E range are the best preserved, although the W range is represented by low walls. Outside the main hub to the NE stand the remains of the Infirmary and the Abbot's Lodging.

This report is concerned only with the church. The cloister buildings are the subject of another entry on the website.

The church was founded in 1135 (see History) but it is generally agreed that the construction of the church that stands on the site today was begun in the 1150s or even the 1160s, and certainly after the absorption of the Savignac order into the Cistercians in 1147. It was a cruciform church with an aisleless vaulted, square-ended presbytery terminating in a trio of tall lancets; a crossing tower and unaisled transepts with a pair of E chapels on each arm. The outer bay of the N transept is raised to accommodate an undercroft. The aisled nave is of 7 bays with no gallery of triforium but a clerestorey. The W facade had no entrance doorway but a pair of tall windows lighting the main vessel and a similar one for the S aisle (the W wall of the N aisle is lost but may anyway have been obscured by the W range of the cloister block). The site is now roofless, and the nave aisle walls are gone.

The Abbey was founded in 1135 by Roger de Clinton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield for the order of Savigny. From the start the dedication was the same as that of Lichfield Cathedral, to St Mary and St Chad. In 1147 Buildwas became a Cistercian house when the Savignac order was merged with that of the Cistercians. The Abbey was dissolved in 1536, and in the following year the site was granted to Sir Edward Grey, Lord Powis, who settled the estate on his illegitimate son, also named Edward. He converted the buildings to the NE of the cloister into a grand residence, which was to be sold to Sir William Acton, along with the entire Buildwas estate, in 1648. It passed to Walter Moseley later in the century and remained in that family into the 20thc. In 1925 the now dilapidated buildings were placed in the guardianship of the Office of Works. The house remained in private ownership, while the church and cloister areas passed to the care of English Heritage in 1984.

The earliest sculptures diagnostic of date are the flat leaf and waterleaf capitals of the crossing archches, possibly of the 1170s. The scalloped capitals in the same areas of the church, and in the nave arcades could, of course, be earlier, but the form was so long-lived as to be practically useless for dating purposes. The entire issue is clouded by the reflection that this was a Cistercian house, likely to be committed to plainer styles of ornament. The trumpet scallops and stiff leaf of the presbytery vault suggest a date in the closing decades of the 12thc. The nave arcade capitals are relatively plain scallops, but the clerestory capitals, where they have survived, are crockets or stiff-leaf. By the time the W front windows were reached the crocket capital was the norm, all of which tends to suggest that while the church was laid out from E to W as may be expected, much of the nave arcade sculpture was at least ready for use in the main arcade by 1160-70. It should be noted that the sedilia in the presbytery are a later addition of c.1230.