About
Few designed landscapes in England achieve the particular quality of combined artifice and natural drama that Thomas Duncombe III created at Rievaulx Terrace around 1758. The terrace — a long, gently curving grass walk along the rim of a steep-sided escarpment above the River Rye — was conceived as a landscape experience of calculated perfection: a promenade between two 18th-century temples, punctuated by a sequence of viewpoints that frame the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in the valley far below, each view carefully positioned to present the Cistercian ruin in a different light and from a different angle, like a sequence of composed paintings through which the visitor physically moves.
The Picturesque movement — that peculiarly 18th-century English sensibility that found in the combination of natural scenery, romantic ruins, and calculated paths a form of aesthetic and moral experience — found one of its finest expressions here. Thomas Duncombe was inspired by the landscape designs of his neighbour and kinsman at Duncombe Park (whose own terrace walk, a generation earlier, had pioneered the concept), and by the writings of the landscape theorists who were defining the Picturesque aesthetic in the mid-18th century. But the genius of Rievaulx Terrace lies in the material it had to work with: the Cistercian abbey in the valley is not a convenient ruin placed for effect but a genuine medieval monument of extraordinary scale and beauty, its roofless nave and transepts gradually revealed as the visitor moves along the terrace above.
At either end of the terrace stand the two temples that give the landscape its formal punctuation: the Ionic Temple at the southern end, with an exceptional painted ceiling, fine plasterwork, and classical furnishings (including a set of Georgian furniture of real quality) that suggest its use as a banqueting or entertainment space; and the more austere Tuscan Temple at the northern end, simpler in finish and more rural in character. The contrast between the two temples — the elaborate and the restrained — mirrors the contrast between the cultivated terrace and the wild escarpment below.
The National Trust manages the terrace and temples with sensitivity to both the designed landscape and the ecological character of the escarpment woodland. The views of Rievaulx Abbey from the terrace are among the most celebrated in Yorkshire — a combination of designed and discovered beauty that has been drawing visitors for nearly three centuries and that has lost none of its power to astonish.
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Highlights
The Terrace Walk and Viewpoints
The designed promenade along the curving grass terrace is the fundamental experience of Rievaulx — a walk of approximately one mile from the Ionic Temple to the Tuscan Temple, punctuated by viewpoints at which the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey appear far below in the valley, framed by the escarpment woodland on either side.
Each viewpoint presents the abbey from a slightly different angle and at a slightly different distance, the sequence building a cumulative impression of the ruins that is entirely different from the experience of visiting the abbey from the valley floor. The effect Thomas Duncombe intended — a meditation on time, ruin, and the relationship between human achievement and natural landscape — still works.
The Ionic Temple Interior
The Ionic Temple at the southern end of the terrace conceals a remarkable interior within its modest classical exterior: a painted ceiling of considerable quality, fine plasterwork in the Georgian taste, and a set of period furniture that suggests its use as a dining and entertainment space for the Duncombe household.
The ceiling painting, attributed to Giambattista Cipriani's circle, depicts classical subjects in the fashionable mid-18th-century manner. The contrast between the refined interior — its carpets, curtains, classical furniture, and elaborate ceiling — and the dramatic natural landscape visible through the windows is one of the defining experiences of 18th-century landscape taste.
The Tuscan Temple
At the northern end of the terrace stands the more austere Tuscan Temple — simpler in its architectural vocabulary, less elaborately furnished, more rural in character than its Ionic counterpart at the southern end. The contrast between the two temples was deliberate: the Ionic Temple representing the refined and civilised, the Tuscan representing the rural and simple, the two together expressing the 18th-century aesthetic conviction that beauty could be found in both polish and plainness.
The Tuscan Temple provides the best views northward along the terrace and toward the moors beyond the abbey valley.
Rievaulx Abbey in the Valley
The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey — founded by Walter l'Espec in 1132 as the first Cistercian house in the north of England — are the landscape's raison d'être, the romantic ruin around which the entire terrace was designed. From the terrace viewpoints, the abbey appears as a Gothic composition of extraordinary scale: the nave arcade, the choir, the transepts, and the chapter house ruins visible in different combinations from different points on the walk.
The abbey itself (managed by English Heritage, separate admission, reached from the valley) must be experienced at ground level to understand the scale that the terrace views hint at but cannot fully convey.
Collections
The Picturesque at Rievaulx: An 18th-Century Landscape Experience
Interpretation in the Ionic Temple exploring the Picturesque movement and the specific design intentions of Thomas Duncombe III — the philosophy of landscape, the relationship to Rievaulx Abbey, and the connection to the earlier Duncombe Park terrace.
Ionic Temple: Furnishings and Painted Ceiling
The elaborately furnished interior of the Ionic Temple — painted ceiling, classical plasterwork, period furniture — displayed with interpretation on the temple's use and its place in the designed landscape experience.
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.