Joe and I went to Thornton Abbey today. This is not unusual as it is just off my route home from work and is the nearest English Heritage site. However, this month they have, after years of being open just one Sunday afternoon in the month if it the weather is Ok and the chap with they key remembers to turn up, reopened the gatehouse on a daily basis with a snazzy new display in the great chamber and an easier access route than up the spiral stairs.
Joe took a load of photos, so here are just a few.
The gatehouse and barbican.
The abbey ruins viewed from the gatehouse.
The great gate. There is a myth that is that it was burned by Henry VIII which is repeated on several websites and by the BBC Look North programme, but the truth is that time and weather wore the gate away.
John Bellew, MP for Grimsby in the 1550s and four times mayor of the borough had a life patent to act for the abbot of Thornton on the King's Bench, which didn't stop him working for Thomas Cromwell and reaping the benefits of this by, among other things, farming the new park at Thornton College (as it became after the dissolution) and fencing it for the king. He was married to Ursula Appleyard, the niece of the last abbot of Thornton, who may or may not have been the same Ursula Appleyard who appears rather tentatively on my family tree.
EthelRed
I've been to Thornton Abbey but it was at the time of Foot and Mouth Disease so we weren't allowed to walk round all of the grounds. Some of my ancestors lived at nearby Killingholme.