Trip to Rievaulx Abbey 

It's not Yorksheer, but Yorkshah, my friend. I don't know which part of the country you come from, but here in Yorkshire we sound the Shire of any county the same way. not shyre, or sheer, or share, but shah. It's often people who come from 'sex' not shire named places that pronounce it wrong. It's pronounced Ree-Voh, from old Norman French for the valley of the River Rye, now called Ryedale. They diverted the River Rye to bring stone to the site. The Abbey was complete on the one occasion that the Scots attacked it in the 14th century. It did not need to be rebuilt afterwards, just a few repairs, because they didn't destroy the place. It was closed down, like all the other Abbeys by Henry 8th, & the usable stone has been robbed to build later buildings. it took just a couple of hundred years to build, because they kept replacing parts in the latest style several times, just like most other large churches etc. It's actually about 30 generations ago the Abbey was built. There have been 40 generations since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Church inherited many Roman techniques of water management & building. They didn't use horses to carry the stone, but Bullock carts, & much came by boats along the river, from quarries many miles away. At the same times hundreds of Castles, the casels, not carsils, it's from the Latin 'Castrum' (not carstrum) were also being constructed, & there were some 40 similar monasteries in Yorkshire alone, & stone churches in every village, while towns & cities often had numerus churches, some enormous Cathedrals. So from the 10th century until the 15th the country was one great building site, with many experienced builders able to move from place to place for work. The monks at Rievaulx opened up the wild moorlands to sheep rearing, producing loads of wool, but they also mined iron & other minerals, grew trees for timber etc. They ran their own farms & rented others out to peasant farmers, so really developed the land . All this activity was the capital investment of the country, & a very large part of the economy was related to these building works, ultimately nearly everybody worked for them in some capacity, either directly or indirectly.