Buckfast

Buckfast is the site of Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, close to Buckfastleigh. The abbey says it was founded in 1018 by King Cnut. The Digital History Institute's Cistercian pages say instead it was founded by a local nobleman, and rank it among the poorest monasteries in Wessex in Domesday Book. King Stephen granted it to the Abbot of Savigny in the 1130s (1134 and 1136 both appear), and in 1147 it joined the Cistercians. By the later Middle Ages it was one of the wealthiest Cistercian houses in southern England.

It surrendered in 1539 with an income of £466 and 22 monks, down from about 180 in the twelfth century. Most of it was demolished. The fourteenth century Abbot's Tower survives, and is Grade II* listed.

Benedictine monks exiled from France bought the site in 1882, and the first six arrived on 28 October that year. The architect Frederick Walters began designing buildings for them in 1883. The abbey church was begun in 1907 on the medieval foundations and consecrated in 1932. It was built mostly by a small group of the monks under a master mason, and the Digital History Institute dates the work as 1907 to 1937.

The abbey sells a tonic wine whose recipe, it says, came from a visitor in 1897. Brother Adam (Karl Kehrle) kept bees there for over seventy years and travelled more than 100,000 miles looking for bee strains. His crossbreeding on Dartmoor produced the Buckfast Bee.