Why here?

Ramsey Abbey was one of England’ s greatest Monasteries at a time when they represented the major landowners and seats of learning. Unfortunately, unlike some of the medieval Great Houses elsewhere, virtually nothing survives of the physical remains of the Abbey, although we know it was located somewhere within the buildings that make up the modern Ramsey Abbey School. We have excellent documents for Ramsey, but we don’t even know exactly where the Great Abbey Church was located.

Because Benedictine monasteries usually conformed to a known plan, at least in a general sense, it is possible to guess the shape of the main buildings, and perhaps suggest their approximate size, but their location has been subject to speculation only, at least until now.

In 1967 a plan was published by Philip Dickinson which used the surviving documented information regarding the construction dates of various buildings at Ramsey, to produce a ‘model’ for what the layout may have looked like. In addition he and earlier scholars had concluded that one of the few surviving pieces of medieval buildings from the monastery may well be the remains of a Lady Chapel that therefore should have been located on the north side of the church’s east end. From this he then constructed a general model for the location of the church and cloister shown here as Model A (above). This therefore provided a key basis for our geophysical survey design as if we could test for the remains of these buildings we might be able to confirm or refute Dickinson’s theory.