The gatehouses, Pynion End and Abbey House

Abbey House beside the abbey ruins. Photo: N Chadwick, geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Walk down Church Street and you are walking through the abbey, though you would not know it without being told. The arch by the road is the inner gatehouse, 14th century; the springers of its wide chamfered arch are still in the wall. The outer gatehouse stood across the road and is down to a few fragments. Behind the church, the tall ashlar gable with the diagonal buttresses is Pynion End, built about 1400. It is the last upstanding piece of the abbey buildings, it still has a fireplace recess in it, and it was patched up in 1846. Abbey House, fifty yards from the church, is a 17th-century house with 18th-century wings, and built into it are carved stones from the 12th-century abbey, among them a corbel carved with the crab of the zodiac and a capital with a man's head. The Old Manor House, north-west of the church, is late 16th century and has an outside stone staircase. Everything else, the monks' church of St Peter, the cloister and the dormitory, went into the walls of the village after 1539. A good many cottages have a bit of abbey in them somewhere.