History of Rievaulx Terrace
Rievaulx Terrace, completed in 1757, was part of the designed landscape surrounding Duncombe Park, the home of Thomas Duncombe II and his wife, Lady Diana. Walking or riding along the Terrace offered glimpses of the picturesque ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in the valley below.
Two fashionable neoclassical temples stood at opposite ends of the Terrace. These created additional visual foci, while the larger building could host summer dinner parties.
The woodlands surrounding the Terrace appeared perfectly natural. In fact, they were the product of centuries of management by Rievaulx’s monks and the iron-makers who followed them.
A monastic landscape
In 1131 Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux Abbey, in north-east France, founded Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. Walter Espec, the lord of the nearby village of Helmsley, donated 1,000 acres of his land to support the new Cistercian community.
Another monk, William of Newburgh, described the site chosen for the abbey as ‘a fearsome, lonely waste’. The under-exploited, sparsely inhabited valley of the river Rye suited both Espec and the monks.
At that time, the valley floor probably supported lush meadows. The valley sides – too steep for building or ploughing – remained wooded.
Ashberry Hill, opposite Rievaulx Terrace, is named Mons Escherberch in monastic documents, meaning ‘ash-birch hill’. Both ash and birch are colonising species, indicating that people had already changed the character of the ancient forest.
The monks managed their woodlands by coppicing: cutting the trunks just above ground level in autumn/winter. This drastic pruning promoted rapid growth of multiple stems, which could be harvested for making charcoal after about seven years.
Oaks – the best timber for building – were often left to grow to maturity. Every autumn, when fallen acorns were plentiful, the swineherd took the abbey’s pigs into the woods to forage (although Cistercians were vegetarian). Over time, the monks’ use of the woodlands transformed the ecosystem.
An industrial landscape
Today, visitors to Rievaulx Terrace enjoy the peace and tranquillity of the Rye valley. But for 100 years after the closure of the medieval abbey, the half-ruined monastic buildings lay at the heart of a noisy, smelly industrial landscape.
In 1538, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII evicted the Cistercian monks and sold the abbey and its land to Thomas Manners (1492–1543), 1st Earl of Rutland. Manners dismantled many buildings to sell the materials, but soon decided to re-employ Lambert Semer, the existing tenant of the monastery’s forge, to continue iron production.
In 1577, a blast furnace was built – possibly the first in northern England. A waterwheel powered the noisy bellows that blasted air into the furnace, keeping it hot enough to smelt iron ore, which was mined in Bilsdale, the neighbouring valley.
The furnace needed huge quantities of charcoal, which was produced in the woodlands on the valley sides. Smoke from the slow-burning charcoal-making mounds (called ‘clamps’) joined the smoke from the furnace.
Iron production peaked around 1600. But by the 1640s, the woodlands were over-exploited and the richest iron ore was running out, so production ceased. Bluebells and other species found around Rievaulx Terrace are legacies of this industrial woodland management.
Sources of inspiration
In the 18th century, young aristocrats toured Europe to experience Classical art and architecture, and life. Thomas Duncombe II (c.1724–1779) returned from his Grand Tour in 1747, aged about 23, and moved into the estate he had just inherited: Duncombe Park.
John Vanburgh (1664–1726) had designed the house at Duncombe Park, completed in 1713, to resemble a huge Classical temple. In the 1730s, Thomas II’s father (Thomas I) had constructed East Terrace behind the house. This broad, curving walk followed the river valley’s crest for over a third of a mile, linking two neoclassical temples. The northern temple also overlooked the ruins of Helmsley Castle.
While 18th-century garden designers such as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown had to dam streams, sculpt hillsides and plant woodlands to create landscapes that mimicked nature, North Yorkshire’s dramatic scenery needed relatively light artificial enhancements. From 1749 onwards, for example, Yorkshire landowner William Aislabie (1700–81), who was related to young Thomas by marriage, turned the wooded river valley at Hackfall, nearly 10 miles from his house at Studley Royal, into a detached garden. Studley Royal itself included woodland walks along valley crests, revealing scenes of more artificial garden features below, including the ruins of Fountains Abbey.
In February 1749, Thomas II married Lady Diana Howard (1723–70). Her grandfather had commissioned a designed landscape on the grandest possible scale at nearby Castle Howard. This too featured a terraced walk along the edge of an ancient wood.
Soon after their wedding, Thomas and Lady Diana decided to outshine their ancestors’ achievements. Rievaulx Abbey’s ruins, like Helmsley Castle, offered a ready-made ornamental focus, while Ryedale’s wooded scenery provided a beautiful setting for a sequence of changing views.
‘One of the finest terraces in England’
According to an 18th-century diary entry, labourers took eight years to move the earth to level Rievaulx Terrace, which was nearly half a mile long. Thomas Duncombe II paid them even less than farm labourers: just six pence per day – equivalent to about £3 today.
Two neoclassical temples, echoing those on Thomas I’s East Terrace, were complete by 1757. The Tuscan Temple stood at the south end and the Ionic Temple at the north.
A fire at Duncombe Park in 1879 destroyed documents relating to Rievaulx Terrace, so the scheme’s designer is unknown. It was possibly Sir Thomas Robinson, a Yorkshire baronet and amateur architect who had married Lady Diana’s aunt.
The woodland below the terrace now hides each temple from the other, but a description by Arthur Young indicates that the trees were lower when he visited in 1768. Today, cleared corridors allow visitors to look down on the abbey ruins from different angles. But all the trees are under about 250 years old, hinting that the whole slope was once clear. As we can only roughly date the present trees, however, the precise situtation in the 1750s remains uncertain.
When John Burton visited in 1758, he called the terrace ‘one of the finest in England’. For Young, who became well-known for his books about agriculture, the scene was ‘a little paradise’. He also praised the working farmland that provided the backdrop to the picturesque ruins.
Sir Thomas Robinson, aristocratic architect
Aged 17, Sir Thomas Robinson (1703–77) inherited Rokeby Park (now in County Durham). He acquired a colourful reputation as a social climber who spent lavishly.
During his Grand Tour in his early twenties, he was impressed by the neoclassical designs of Venetian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–80). On his return to England in 1725, he quickly spent much of his inheritance on rebuilding Rokeby Hall in a Palladian style.
By 1731, Sir Thomas had planted thousands of trees in Rokeby’s parkland and created a terraced walk overlooking the river Tees. The ruins of Egglestone Abbey stood within the Rokeby estate, but his terrace did not involve the ruins.
In 1738, Robinson designed a Palladian wing for Castle Howard, the magnificent house that his wife’s brother had just inherited. This led to other architectural commissions. Following the death of his wife in 1739, he hosted extravagant parties for hundreds of London socialites.
By 1742, the growing threat of bankruptcy forced him to accept a job as Governor of Barbados. As governor, he became deeply involved in the island’s slave economy. There were soon accusations of corruption and he was recalled after less than five years.
He had married a wealthy widow in Barbados, but she refused to return to England with him. His financial situation remained difficult and in 1769 he was forced to sell Rokeby Park. If he did design of the Rievaulx Terrace, it was in this later stage of his career, when it was probably his need for money that led him to revert to architectural commissions.
The Tuscan temple
The Tuscan Temple at the Terrace’s southern end was complete by 1757. Its design is similar to that of the Tuscan Temple built about 30 years earlier at the southern end of Thomas I’s East Terrace, behind Duncombe Park House.
The building is a ‘rotunda’ – a central circular room with a domed roof, ringed by a portico of 12 simple columns (a ‘Doric’ style). The interior was large enough for a small group to take shelter there or drink tea.
Both this temple and the similar one on the East Terrace copied a design by Andrea Palladio. In turn, Palladio was inspired by the ruined temple of Vesta, at Tivoli near Rome, dating to the 1st century BC. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, traditionally a circular patch at the centre of the home, so all her temples were round.
Inside, the walls were richly decorated, probably by the Swiss-Italian Giuseppe Cortese, who around this time was renting a house in Ripon owned by William Aislabie. In the early 19th century, the temple’s original flooring was replaced with decorated medieval tiles taken from Rievaulx Abbey’s church.
The domed ceiling displays a winged goddess, perhaps Fama (‘Reputation’), probably painted by the Italian artist Andrea Casali (1705–84). Lady Diana’s father had persuaded him to work at Castle Howard in 1741.
The Ionic temple
Like the Tuscan Temple, the Ionic Temple at the northern end of the Terrace was probably designed by Thomas Robinson and completed in 1757. It was modelled on a rectangular temple that still stands in Rome today. The term ‘Ionic’ refers to the style of the columns, which are characterised by the volutes, or scroll-like ornaments, on their capitals.
The interior was large enough for the Duncombes to dine there with guests after walking along the Terrace. Servants prepared meals in a small kitchen in the basement. The dozen mahogany dining chairs in the temple today were probably made for this building.
The other furniture was brought here in the 20th century by Charles Duncombe (1906–63), 3rd Earl of Feversham. The two gilt settees by William Kent, a leading Yorkshire-born designer, are internationally important pieces.
The interior is richly decorated, featuring stucco (moulded plasterwork), probably by Giuseppe Cortese. A magnificent fresco depicting scenes from Greek myths is probably by the Italian artist Giuseppe Mattia Borgnis, who came to England in about 1753.
A scene at the centre of the ceiling, based on a mural by Guido Reni in the Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome, features the sun god Apollo, his sister Aurora (Dawn), and the Muses, representing music and the arts.
A case of mistaken divinity
The Ionic Temple was modelled on a temple that overlooked Rome’s ancient cattle market alongside the river Tiber. Restored in the 1st century BC and used as a church until 1916, it is an extraordinary survival.
Renaissance scholars thought that the temple belonged to Fortuna Virilis. Fortuna, the goddess of luck, was cared for by priestesses. ‘Fortuna Virilis’ means ‘manly luck’, and the goddess had the power to make women more attractive to men.
With their Classical education, aristocratic visitors to Duncombe Park would have known this and understood the building’s subtle message: that Rievaulx Terrace was a place for romance.
In the late 19th century, however, Classical scholars began to suspect that the ancient temple was dedicated not to Fortuna, but to Portunus, the god of doors and ports (respectively porta and portus in Latin). Due to his association with gateways, Portunus was also sometimes linked to livestock. It was therefore appropriate that his temple overlooked Rome’s river port and the adjacent cattle market. But this unromantic god had no relevance to Rievaulx Terrace.
The Terrace in later times
By 1804, the Ionic Temple’s basement housed a gardener, who must have moved out whenever his home was needed as a kitchen. According to The Gentleman’s Magazine, he offered refreshments to tourists.
About ten years later, Charles Duncombe (1764–1841) excavated the choir of Rievaulx Abbey church and took decorated floor tiles to refloor the Tuscan Temple. In the 1920s, over 200 more tiles were found near the Ionic Temple, suggesting that he intended to refloor that too.
By the 1870s, the resident gardener who lived in the Ionic Temple’s basement was displaying pot plants for sale on the front steps. In the early 20th century, the gardener was William Richardson, who lived in the basement with his wife, Mary, and several daughters and grandchildren.
From the outbreak of the First World War, a girls’ school occupied Duncombe Park. In 1916 the head of the Duncombe family was killed in action in France, along with many local men in his battalion.
By this time, the woodland downslope needed management to preserve the views from the Terrace. A 1925 guidebook refers to 14 separate openings.
Soon after the Second World War, the paintwork in the Ionic Temple was restored, guided by 18th-century descriptions. The 3rd (and last) Earl of Feversham chose a blue colour scheme for the Tuscan Temple.
Following the death of the 3rd Earl in 1963, the National Trust bought the Terrace and the adjoining woods. In June 2026 responsibility for the Terrace passed to English Heritage.
Find out more
-
Visit Rievaulx Terrace
Visit one of England’s finest ‘Picturesque’ landscape gardens, created in the 1750s for Thomas Duncombe II, owner of Rievaulx Abbey and a nearby mansion.
-
Visit Rievaulx Abbey
Visit the remains of England’s most majestic and complete abbey ruins, in the tranquil wooded valley below Rievaulx Terrace.
-
History of Rievaulx Abbey
Discover the history of Rievaulx Abbey, from its foundation in 1132 to its 20th-century preservation.
-
MORE HISTORIES
Delve into our history pages to discover more about our sites, how they have changed over time, and who made them what they are today.