Kirkstall Abbey: In One Volume

By a Lady

Saturday was the first of many day trips on this study abroad excursion of mine. My new friends and I took a quick bus ride 20 minutes outside of the city to the site of the Kirkstall Abbey ruins. For a mere £4, we got out of the city center and went on a miniature adventure. 

Judith, Sara, Petra, and I at Kirkstall Abbey

The abbey was beautiful even though it was partially collapsed. The structure was still pretty massive. The main church building (the most important, according to the information plaque) was long and narrow and quite tall. The walls were still standing and rose several stories high, drawing your eye upward, I’m assuming toward the heavens, where the roof was no long in place and, instead, swarms of birds roosted and flew about. It was strange being in such an old building that had been dead for so long, like walking around the skeleton of an Abbey, already being reclaimed by mossy floors and winged inhabitants. My friends took loads of pictures (it was a photoshoot waiting to happen), while I pranced about, running my hands along the stone pillars, absolutely amazed to be touching something that was at least a thousand years old. I had never seen a structure so old before, and yet here it was, wilted but still standing--over a thousand years old, and now it had its own bus stop. 

We happened to be there on the same day as a food market, which was happening within part of the structure itself. We walked through a low, narrow arch way into a courtyard full of vendor tents. You could buy anything from mini Yorkshire pies, to local jams and honey, to “Yankie” desserts (which were mostly brownies with M&Ms cut into massive squares, of course), to hot food vendors. I ended up eating a traditional Senegalese fish, veggie, and rice dish, which was wonderful and amazing. The rice is cooked in tomato soup! And the tilapia was so fresh, stuffed with parsley and lightly fried to order. My friends and I ate our food while sitting on some ruins, watching people playing catch with their dogs on the 60 acres of parkland surrounding the ruins. 

It looked like the setting of a Brontë novel, I swear, with the trees and wildflowers down near the river bank, and the soft green grass—all shadowed by the imposing, gray-stone Abbey. Very dramatic and gothic.

P.S. If you want to see more pictures of my adventures, click on the Instagram logo at the top of the righthand nav bar (it's the first icon that looks like a little camera)!