30/08/2026
Lost to the elements in East Yorkshire... 🌾🏚️
Hidden deep within the rural landscape near Wawne sits the eerie, skeletal remains of Meaux Abbey Cottage. While the ground beneath it dates back to 1150, once serving as a bustling 85-acre Cistercian monastery, this striking brick-and-stone ruin is actually a 19th-century farm worker's cottage.
It was built around 1828 by the wealthy Wise family, who purchased the historic estate to transform the former abbey grounds into a thriving Victorian agricultural farm.
Decades of abandonment have allowed nature to completely reclaim the property. Today, the entire eastern gable has collapsed, fully exposing the interior chimney stack, while mature trees and thick brambles push right through the surviving masonry. Because it was built centuries after King Henry VIII levelled the monastery, the cottage is legally excluded from the scheduling protections placed on the ancient monument fields, leaving it in a legal grey area to gracefully decay.
For those wanting to catch a glimpse, a loop of public footpaths along Meaux Lane and the historic Wawne Drain offers views of the ruins from a safe distance. Just be mindful of local lore, isolated and swallowed by vegetation, the ruin is widely known in regional folklore as the "Haunted Abbey Cottage", where walkers still whisper about spotting the apparitions of White Monks wandering the treeline....
