The west front of the abbey still stands almost to its full height, and set into it is the broken rim of a great rose window, a half-circle of stone where the glass used to be. Across the road from it is a pub. That is more or less the whole of Byland Abbey: a Cistercian ruin, a nineteenth-century inn facing it, and a triangular car park that holds about nine cars.
The Abbey Inn has looked across at the ruins for close to two hundred years, turning up in paintings and photographs of the site for most of that time. It is now run by Tommy Banks, who calls it "a proper, country pub serving up reimagined classics with our signature Oldstead style." The family farm and a two-acre kitchen garden sit under two miles away and supply the kitchen with Dexter cattle, rare-breed pigs, Herdwick sheep and whatever the garden is producing that week.
The menu bears this out. Beer-battered haddock comes with minted peas, tartare and curry sauce; there is a Saddleback pork pie, a keema lamb pie, crispy chicken in a sea buckthorn buffalo sauce, BBQ miso pollock, herb-dressed monkfish and a salt-aged Dexter steak. Out in the garden the offer is simpler, a Dexter beef smash burger and filled Yorkshire puddings on Sundays. The pub took the Good Food Guide's Best Sunday Roast in Britain in 2024 and the Gastropub Awards' Sustainable Pub of the Year the following year.
The garden tables face the abbey and go first come, first served. Dogs are welcome on leads in the bar, the dining room and the garden, though not in the bedrooms. The building is old and behaves like it, with uneven floors, changes in level and steps here and there, and a ramp to the rear dining room.
The ruins themselves are free to walk around. The great church had a nave of twelve bays, and a substantial medieval tile pavement survives in the south transept. The detail worth finding is above the warming house: scratched full-size into a flagstone is the master mason's own tracery design for that rose window, the working drawing left in the stone.
The monks came to a marsh. Their community had begun in 1128, adopted the Cistercian rule in 1147, and drained the wet Byland site from the late 1150s before they could occupy it in 1177. Sheep and the wool trade were its main income. In 1322 the Scots under Robert the Bruce surprised an English force at Shaws Moor close by; Edward II fled from nearby Rievaulx to York, and the abbey was pillaged.
The end came on 30 November 1538, when Abbot John Ledes and twenty-five monks signed the deed surrendering Byland to Henry VIII. A ceramic ink stand recovered from the chapter house, with fifteen holes for quills and wells for ink, water and blotting sand, is thought to be the only ink stand known to have been used to sign a monastic surrender.
The stone was then picked over by its own neighbours. In 1819 the owner Martin Stapylton dug through the church looking for the grave of the founder, Roger de Mowbray, carried carved stone off to Myton Hall, and left other pieces to be built into local cottages. The state took guardianship in 1920 and began proper excavation the year after.
The walks start from the inn's door. Fred Banks's circular route climbs the southern escarpment of the Hambleton Hills to the Mount Snever Observatory and returns through Wass, in five-mile and six-and-a-half-mile versions. A shorter 4.8-mile loop covers similar ground with about 250 metres of ascent; the woodland descent turns very muddy after rain.
Rievaulx Abbey is a short drive, and Helmsley Castle is nearby, enough for a second ruin in an afternoon. The Kilburn White Horse, cut into the hillside in 1857 by the village schoolmaster and his pupils, is a climb of steps to a long view over the vale. Thirsk, the nearest station, is ten miles off; the abbey lies two miles south of the A170 between Thirsk and Helmsley, and buses 31X and the seasonal Moorsbus M5 and M31 stop near the entrance, timetables permitting.
On the grass among the fallen stones there is a labyrinth, made by volunteers out of natural materials, that you are free to walk. It is a small thing beneath a very large ruin, and worth the few minutes it takes.