Geograph - photograph every grid square

Cleeve was a Cistercian abbey founded at the end of the 12th century. In common with all monastic houses in England it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536 shortly after which the abbey church was dismantled. Unusually, however, the cloister has remained remarkably intact giving visitors a particularly good insight into monastic life in the middle ages. The buildings were used as a private house and later a farm ; in the late 19th century the site was acquired by George Luttrell who did a great deal of work to preserve the remaining fabric and opened it to the public. The abbey passed to the state in 1951 and is now in the guardianship of English Heritage.

This small selection of photos by my father was taken before the abbey passed into the care of the (then) Ministry of Works. It brings back one particularly vivid memory of being taken up into the frater to be shown the vestiges of the wall painting of the Crucifixion. By that stage it was already virtually impossible to make anything of the image out - my recollection is of little more than green damp stains all over the plaster - and the image was beyond recovery when the MoW took over. Unfortunately there is no photograph of it in the family holiday diary.

Some details of this important, but lost, painting can be found here: Link p.98

My father David was an enthusiastic and competent amateur photographer and owned a prewar Leica camera. These photos were taken by him in the course of family holidays principally in Cornwall, Somerset and Pembrokeshire, in the 1940s and 1950s when I was a small boy.

My parents kept holiday diaries into which the prints were pasted, so it has been possible to locate and date images with reasonable accuracy. A large proportion of the pictures in the diaries are of family members and not suitable for Geograph, although people do appear in some of the pictures where the scenic value makes them worthwhile for the historical value.

The photos are scanned from small commercial prints (about 3 x 2 inches which was the normal size in those days) rather than from original negatives (long since jettisoned!). Even so, I have been surprised how much detail is captured by using a large dpi scan setting; they are still equivalent to a 10-12 megapixel digital image, although reduced size images have been submitted for this series.