📌 Coldingham, Scottish Borders
★★
At the centre of an attractive, slumbersome Borders village, Coldingham Priory looks like quite a plain building from some angles – perhaps unusually so. But wander around its sides and through the adjacent graveyard and you begin to appreciate that there’s more to it than meets the eye. A much grander priory once stood here, built in 1216 to replace a destroyed, earlier incarnation. The grandeur wasn’t to last however, with fires, invading armies and the Reformation reducing the site to a shadow of its former self by 1650. The choir was soon resurrected as the parish church you can see (and if you time your visit carefully, enter) today; the interior has one extremely ornate wall and one particularly plain one. And the larger priory? Its footprint is still visible through old stonework and signposts around the grounds.
🌍 Location
📌 Off Bridge Street (A1107), Coldingham village centre
🧭 O.S. Grid Reference: NT 904659
🛰️ GPS coordinates: 55.886552,-2.155172
🚌 Bus to Coldingham
🚗 Village centre car park
📝 Key info
⌚ Exterior always viewable. Interior: probably Wednesday afternoons, May to September, plus Sunday afternoons, July & August
🎫 Free
