Buckfast

Buckfast lies on the Dart just above Buckfastleigh, and it exists because of its abbey. A monastery was founded here before the Norman Conquest and became a wealthy Cistercian house, running sheep on the moor and growing rich on wool, until Henry VIII dissolved it in 1539 and the buildings fell into ruin and were quarried away.

What stands now is remarkable. French Benedictine monks refounded the house in the late nineteenth century and set about rebuilding the abbey church on the original foundations, working with a handful of men, most with no training as masons, over more than thirty years until it was finished in 1938. It is a working monastery still, open to visitors, with gardens, a church that repays a slow look, and a community that supports itself by its own labour, including the tonic wine and the bees for which Buckfast is known well beyond Devon.