Sherwood Forest

We slept in a bit and then had a leisurely breakfast with Steve and Hazel.

Steve and Hazel took us out for the day to show us some sights.

First we went to Sherwood Forest. We had a walk though the forest and the dappled sunlight was lovely on the leaves.

Steve and Hazel

We saw many ancient trees. There are oaks in this forest well over one thousand years old.

This one was enormous.

We had some lunch there and then moved onto Roche Abbbey in South Yorkshire.

The abbey was founded in 1147 when the stone buildings were raised on the north side of the beck. When the monks first arrived in South Yorkshire from Newminster Abbey in Northumberland, they chose the most suitable side of the stream that runs through the valley, on which to build their new Cistercian monastery. Twenty-five years later, at the end of the century, the Norman Gothic great church had been finished, as well as most of the other buildings.

From the start, the Abbey of Roche, built for the so-called White Monks, as the Cistercians were known, had an almost otherworldly air. It was, after all, built at the northern end of an area once covered by Sherwood Forest, and it was said that Robin Hood went to Mass here.

It was the dissolution by King Henry VIII of England that rendered the abbey to ruin.

A very nice day.