Introduction to Christianity Visit
On the 27
October 2011 tutors Revd Greg
Hoyland and Dr Chris Maunder
took sixty students to visit Ampleforth Abbey, Mount Grace Priory
and Rievaulx Abbey as part of the module 'Introduction to
Christianity'.
The students saw a working monastery and heard from a monk who
told them about monastic life.
The coach then went on to a ruined abbey so that students,
having visited a modern abbey, could get a sense of what it would
have been like in the middle ages.
The group then went on to visit a rather different monastic
site, Mount Grace Priory, where monks lived in isolation in
independent cells. The cells were comfortable and spacious,
with a garden for each, so that the students remarked that they
could understand why someone would leave a poor village to live in
a monastery.
As first year students having been in university for a month the
visit gave them an opportunity to get to know each other better and
speak to tutors about the course.