Tavistock Abbey, Tavistock

Where there were medieval shrines, there were medieval pilgrims, although even by the 12th century, Tavistock’s cult of St Rumon was fading from the landscape

‍Highlights

• Site of St Rumon’s shrine
• Riverside dripping well

In the centre of Tavistock lie the remains of an important abbey. It once housed the shrine of St Rumon, a 6th-century Cornish bishop. The town’s parish church was built by the abbey and is still in use. The rest of the monastery, including the abbey church, has mostly disappeared.

The parish church is a large and ancient building, somehow absent from Simon Jenkins’ guidebook of England’s Thousand Best Churches. There are plenty of reasons to include it. Sir Francis Drake was baptised in its font, and there is a William Morris window. My aunt and uncle were married here.

The church was next to the medieval monastic complex. It was built by the abbey in the 14th century for the benefit of the town citizens rather than the monks.

The church has two stained-glass windows depicting St Rumon. He appears alongside St Eustace in the east window above the high altar. His shrine was never in this church, however, but kept in the abbey church next door.

A few of the monastery’s outer buildings survive, but there is no trace of the abbey church itself following the Dissolution. One of the stewards told me it was located where the Plymouth Road (A386) now lies, along the south boundary of the parish churchyard.

One arch of the abbey cloisters can be seen in the churchyard by this road. Around the corner from the church, on Abbey Place next to a Spar supermarket, is the abbot’s former hall, now called the Abbey Chapel. It has been used for Presbyterian and nonconformist worship since 1691.

Looking across the A386 from the parish church, you can see the ruins of Betsy Grimbal’s Tower, another monastic building. The unlikely sounding name is perhaps a corruption of ‘Blessed Grimbald,’ a French scholar who moved to Winchester and was recognised as a saint after his death in 901. St Grimbald had no personal links to Devon.

As for the abbey’s main patron, St Rumon could be considered a local saint, a 6th-century bishop of Devon and Cornwall. He crops up at other places in the West Country (see Ruan Minor, page 202, and Romansleigh, page 231). His holy body was moved to Tavistock in 981 by Ordulf, earl of Devon, who wanted a prestigious shrine for the new monastery he was building in town.

St Rumon was greatly venerated at the abbey, but almost nothing is known about his life. A lazy monk in the 12th century decided to make good the deficit and simply copied a different saint’s entire Life, changing the name St Ronan to St Rumon throughout. Researching Celtic saints is a bit harder than that. William of Malmesbury, a rather more industrious 12th-century historian, said he could only discover that St Rumon had been a bishop. The abbey was dedicated to St Mary and St Rumon.‍

While in Tavistock‍

There is a second holy place in Tavistock, a little well with a modest trickle of water, named after St John. It is set in a narrow riverside park on the edge of town. The trickle of holy water emerges from the rocky side of a bank, set around with a granite wellhouse that looks a bit like a fireplace.

It is a dripping well, clearly not suitable for medieval baptism. The John referred to in its dedication might therefore be John the Hermit, who lived on this riverbank in seclusion but was associated with the monastery. A 16th-century record from Tavistock Abbey mentions the hermit and the fact he owned a silver reliquary with a piece of the True Cross.

Directions

St Eustachius Church, Plymouth Road (A386), Tavistock PL19 8AA

www.tavistockparishchurch.org.uk

W3W: visual.insert.held GPS: 50.5497N 4.1452W church, abbey ruins

W3W: year.friend.darker GPS: 50.5463N 4.1467W well‍

The parish church is in the town centre, with a car park opposite on Abbey Place/Bedford Square. The church is usually open during the day. St John’s Well is about half a kilometre from the parish church. From Tavistock town centre, walk east out of town on the A386, past the Abbey Chapel. Cross the bridge over the River Tavy to the roundabout on the far side. Turn right at the roundabout and walk along the riverside path called St John’s Avenue (pedestrians only). Keep following the riverbank, past a car park, and you will see the well on the left, shortly before the final section of the park ends.