The Studley Royal estate in North Yorkshire is celebrated for its stunning 18th century landscape and water garden, which includes the ruins of Fountains Abbey. Studley Royal is one of the few great 18th century landscape gardens to survive substantially in its original form. Its key feature is a spectacular water garden of ponds, formal hedges, statues, temples and contrived vistas. John Aislabie and his son William created the designed landscape between 1718 and 1781.
The Abbey ruins are of outstanding importance in their own right. Fountains Abbey, founded in 1132 and dissolved in 1539, was one of the largest and richest Cistercian houses in the UK. The extensive remains provide an unrivalled picture of a great religious house in all its constituent parts including one of the finest and oldest Cistercian Mills in Europe. The site also includes a deer park with long vistas and veteran trees, Fountains Hall (1604), an elegant mansion of Elizabethan style built with stone from the abbey ruins, and St. Mary's church (1878), a masterpiece of the Gothic Revival designed by the famous architect William, Burges.