This was a great place to spend a leisurely afternoon and was one of the more impressive WHS I have visited in England. The planned gardens were particularly impressive especially the highly formal water garden. Many of the gardens I have visited in the UK have a folly as their focal point, however here the huge remains of Fountains Abbey provide a much better focus. The view from Anne Boleyn's chair is magnificent and shows the best aspects of this planned landscape. I was actually surprised by how extensive the ruins of the abbey were, I was expecting a small church and maybe a few crumbling walls. However the ruins were very large reflecting the fact that this was one of England's largest abbeys.

You have to pay to enter the formal gardens and abbey, however all are free to walk through the Deer Park and visit the impressive neo-Gothic St Mary's church, both of there are really great additions to the world heritage site.

The site is located just outside of Ripon in north Yorkshire. If you don't have your own transport then there are regular buses on Sunday's and few infrequent ones the rest of the week. I unfortunately missed one of the few busses on the Saturday that I visited. However I had half expected this and was prepared for the pleasant 5km walk from the town centre to the start of the gardens proper. It was nice to get into the countryside, and although it wasn't particularly well signposted there always seemed to be a friendly local on hand whenever I reached a cross roads.

This was one of the better WHS I have visited in Britain and the layout of the formal gardens when mixed with the extensive abbey ruins made this a very rewarding site visit.