Described as "The Wonder of the North" in 1729, the Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal World Heritage Site in north Yorkshire is one of the world's most beautiful and magnificent designed landscapes. This volume, based on 25 years' research, for the first time tells its full story, from prehistory through the middle ages to the Victorian era. It charts the rise and fall of England's largest Cistercian monastery, and reveals the hitherto lost history and scale of the Aislabie family's Studley Royal designed landscape, at the forefront of every emergent garden fashion of the eighteenth century.