Her name is Magda. She’s Polish and stylish, which is why I followed her into the charity store in Ripon and asked if I could take her photo. She was kind enough to oblige. I doubt I’m the first to have asked.

“I love vintage style,” she said. Her smile magnetic. She works at a dental lab and has two sons. One went with her to New Orleans last year. They loved it, especially the food, Magda said. Imagine going from a place that routinely sells beans on toast as a morning speciality to eating Mother’s Crawfish Étouffée Omelet. Or anything at Mother’s. She wants to get to Nashville one day. When people in the UK visit the US they primarily hit NYC and Vegas. Nashville and New Orleans are other favorites.

But no one really wants to come to the US since the Orange Tosser got reelected but a lot of Americans like us are getting out of the country. The cabbie who drove us at the UNESCO site of Fountains Abbey said he gets a lot of American visitors. His dad used to drive Bing Crosby around back in the day when Bing would visit. His neice is going to take over the business one day. Driving cabs has been a family business for six generations, he claimed.

You must go see Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Gardens, my friend Jayne told me when she heard I was visiting the Yorkshires. Such an unforgettable place. We missed the Abbey on our trip to the Yorkshires last year, but this week we made the trip.

We woke not to sunshine but not to wind or rain either. And the temps were in the 40s and not in the 30s like it has been. The mist and fog that settled over the Dales would add an ethereal quality to the trip, I figured, so it seemed a pretty good day to adventure out.

The website said there would a tour starting in the early afternoon so we could join that. If it were summer there would be several tours on any given day. But in the winter, it’s more of a hit and miss thing. The Abbey isn’t open on Fridays in the winter because that day is reserved for pheasant hunts. Our guide Colim explained that while the Abbey grounds are owned by the National Trust the shooting rights to the land were sold separately and are privately held. Somebody must have told the pheasants that it wasn’t Friday because when we were there they were out en masse, running through fields, skipping over fallen limbs, searching for snacks along the river banks.

Thirteen Benedictine monks came to the Skell Valley in 1132 after the archbishop of York gave them the inhospitable valley. They wanted to get away from the big city life of York which distracted them from their devotion to God. Remote as the valley was, it wasn’t without perks – chiefly a river. There was also plenty of timber and stone. Combining all that with a work ethic that demanded no idleness and these monks managed to build Britian’s largest and wealthiest abbey.

It’s daunting, thinking about how they built such a magnificent place. I am pretty sure I couldn’t carry one of those stones across 20 feet, much less build a bell tower from them. Colim noted that they did have help from lay brothers who served as bakers, tanners, masons, farmers and ranchers.

It was the sheep who provided the biggest source of income for the monks and their greatest devastation when disease swept through the flocks. Of course Henry the VIII wasn’t helpful either. Jealous over how much influence the Church had over the lives of his subjects and of the wealth of the Church, Henry VIII shut down all the monasteries and abbeys in 1539. And eventually, the Abbey and the lands were sold off to various wealthy investors, who did with it as they willed. The National Trust took over the site in the 1980s.

The Ruins seem like harsh terminology for what remains of the lives once lived here along this rushing river and under these ancient trees. Thirteen monks carved a life of devotion out of the stones and timbers still lining this no longer remote valley, only a ten-minute ride from Ripon.

I like to think all those prayers prayed all those centuries ago soaks the soil upon which over a half-a-million visitors trod yearly. Like us, they come to pay homage to the dedicated Benedictine monks who built Fountains Abbey and to the God they served.