Egglestone Abbey and the Lost Mill
This is one of our Teesdale Tales, a quiet story shaped by real lives on the river bank, told through the stones, the memories and the traces that remain at Egglestone Abbey.
If you walk along the quiet bank of the River Tees and look up at Egglestone Abbey, the ruins sit gently on a grassy rise, open to the sky and softened by years of wind and weather. It feels peaceful now, almost sleepy, but this slope was once full of purpose and daily life.
Although the canons once lived very simply with only a single heated room, the ruins today tell a later story as well. Many of the tall chimneys and grand fireplaces were added long after the abbey closed, when the buildings were turned into a private house. Later owners rebuilt parts of the abbey with new floors, larger windows and extra hearths, which is why the ruins now look more like the shell of a grand home than the plain monastery the canons once knew.
Eight hundred years ago the de Multon family invited a group of White Canons to settle here. These men were priests who lived together like monks but were not shut away from the world. They prayed, they worked, and they walked the lanes of Teesdale to help the people who lived nearby. When they first arrived, they chose this exact spot because the river below offered steady water, fish and the force to turn a mill. The raised ground kept them safe from floods, and local stone could be shaped into blocks for building.
People sometimes imagine monks building their own abbey by hand, but the truth is more practical. It was local stonemasons, carpenters, roofers and labourers who did the heavy work. The canons planned the layout and helped where they could, but the skilled hands were those of ordinary men from the valley. While the abbey was rising stone by stone, the canons lived in simple wooden huts or temporary shelters close to the work. Imagine long huts with straw mattresses, a fire in the middle and the steady noise of hammers and chisels from dawn until dusk.
When the first stone rooms were finished, the canons moved inside and began the daily rhythm of their life. The church was the heart of the abbey. It was one of the only places with any decoration, with light falling through small windows and candles glowing on the altar. The cloister around it was a square of grass with covered walkways, a calm place the canons crossed many times a day.
Beyond that, the rooms had names that can sound grand today but were simple in reality. The chapter house was their meeting room where they gathered each morning. Above it was the dormitory, a single long room where every canon slept. There were no private spaces. Wooden beds with straw filled mattresses were lined up side by side, each with a wool blanket and perhaps a small chest for a few belongings. The refectory was their dining room, where they sat at long wooden tables and ate in silence while one man read aloud. Nearby was the warming room, one of the only spaces with a fire that burned through winter. The kitchen was a stone room with an open fire, a bread oven set into the wall and heavy pots hanging over the flames. Most meals were made from barley, oats, fish, vegetables and bread. Meat was rare, saved for feast days or special moments.
Life in the abbey was shaped by routine. The canons woke before dawn, left their beds in the half dark and went straight down the stairs to pray in the quiet church. They worked the lands around the abbey, cared for animals, baked bread, brewed ale, mended clothes and copied texts. They also spent time outside the abbey walls, walking to nearby farms, preaching in small chapels and offering help to people who needed comfort or advice. Unlike some monastic orders, the White Canons were allowed to travel through the valley. They were meant to serve the community, not hide from it.
The abbey was always poor. It was meant to hold twelve canons, echoing the twelve apostles, but Egglestone often struggled to reach that number. Most of the time the community was probably around ten men, sometimes fewer. We only know four names for certain, because they appear in written records. These men were abbots named Robert, Thomas, John and Christopher. The abbot was the head of the abbey, responsible for both the spiritual life and the practical running of the house. The rest of the canons lived quiet lives that left no written trace, but the walls that remain tell their story more clearly than paper ever could.
Down by the river the canons used the power of the Tees to turn a mill. Over the centuries the mill worked first as a corn mill and long after the abbey was gone it was turned into a paper mill. The remains you can see today are from much later than the medieval canons. The original mill they knew has completely disappeared. Time, water and rebuilding have erased every trace of it, but the river that turned its wheel still runs in the same channel it has followed for a thousand years.
For more than three hundred years the canons lived here through harsh winters, seasons of hunger, peaceful summers and times when the border wars swept close. Yet the daily rhythm of prayer, work and service continued. The long walk from the dormitory to the church, the smell of baking bread, the shuffle of sandals on stone, the warm glow of a candle in the refectory on dark evenings. These small details of daily life carried the abbey from one generation to the next.
The end came not from Teesdale but from London. In the reign of Henry the eighth the monasteries across England were dissolved. In fifteen forty the canons of Egglestone were given small pensions and walked away from the place they had kept alive for centuries.
After the canons left, only one part of the abbey was used as a home. The rest was not needed. Later owners took stone from the empty ranges to repair and pave their estate at Rokeby Park, treating the abandoned abbey as a ready source of building material. Roofs failed, floors collapsed and the unoccupied rooms began to fall into ruin. By the seventeen and eighteen hundreds the idea of a romantic ruin had become fashionable, so the broken walls were left as a picturesque feature on the Morritt estate. This is why so much of the abbey looks stripped today, even though one wing was once a house.
When you wander through the ruins now, you can still sense the shape of the old life. You can imagine the row of beds in the dormitory above you. You can picture the canons sitting at long tables in the refectory. You can almost hear the murmur of prayer from the church and the sound of the mill wheel turning on the river below, even though the mill itself has vanished completely.
Egglestone Abbey is a quiet ruin today, but its story is still here. It sits in the wind and the grass and the stones, in the paths the canons once walked and in the river that powered their work. A place once filled with voices and simple tasks now rests in silence, but the details of the life lived here still belong to Teesdale.
Weathered walls, open sky and the steady sound of the Tees, the quiet beauty of Egglestone Abbey.
Part of our Discover Teesdale collection, explore the dale’s walks, waterfalls, history and quiet forgotten places.
This story is rooted in real history and the traces still visible in the landscape. While some details have faded with time, the life of Egglestone Abbey is told through stone, river and memory rather than imagination.
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