Receiving visitors has been a central aspect of what the landscape in and around Fountains Abbey is used for since the early thirteenth century. In this lecture Mark Newman, the National Trust’s archaeologist for Fountains, explores the different ways the site has been adapted to serve this purpose over the centuries and how profoundly that has been responsible for shaping the World Heritage Site that we experience today.

Mark Newman (M.A., M.C.I.f.A, F.S.A.) has been the National Trust’s archaeologist at Fountains since 1988. He currently advises around 75 properties in the NT’s North region, east of the Pennines, on conservation archaeology and management of the historic environment. This involves sites ranging from Mesolithic settlements to Cold War observation stations. A graduate of Birmingham University, he worked in professional archaeology in Kent and the Midlands before joining the NT, and thereafter across the whole of the North of England, East Midlands and Northern Ireland – as well as Italy, Australia, France, the United States and Guyana, where he has also lectured. His first quarter century of work at Fountains is published as “Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal: The Wonder of the North” (NT/Boydell, 2015).

Pictures courtesy of Mark Newman, National Trust.