Mount Grace Priory, House and Gardens

• The priory ruins, warm sandstone walls and the church tower, set among lawns and woodland.
• The distinctive cell layout around the cloister, the clearest reason to stop here rather than at a more conventional ruin.
• A reconstructed monk's cell, a small stone building with a clipped garden, which does more than any information panel to make monastic life tangible.
• The manor house, a 17th-century mansion refurbished in late Victorian Arts and Crafts style by the industrialist Sir Lowthian Bell.
• Museum displays and excavation artefacts, upstairs in the house.

Bell created the terraced gardens, and there are now around 13 acres in Arts and Crafts style: terraces, mature borders, woodland, a wildflower meadow, a traditional orchard and the Monks' Pond, with a timber deck bridge. Spring is a good time to aim for if the planting is your main draw. The gardens are known for stoats, so it is worth watching the walls and rough grass; you may see one.

Dogs on short leads are welcome in the grounds. They are not allowed in the house, inside the cafe or in the reconstructed cell. Assistance dogs are welcome throughout. The cafe has covered outdoor seating, which helps if you are visiting with a dog and want to sit down.

A ramp leads into the manor house and the priory grounds, and the cafe and its outside seating are wheelchair accessible. Beyond that there are real limits: only the ground floor of the cell and the monastic herb garden (one step) are reachable without narrow doorways, and there are two flights of three steps into the cloister. The manor first floor is up stairs with no lift, and the museum displays are three flights up. Path surfaces mix tarmac, grass, binding gravel and a timber deck bridge. Three accessible parking spaces can be reserved in advance, which is worth arranging given how tight the car park is.

A small car park at busy times, stairs and uneven historic surfaces in places, dogs shut out of the cafe interior, and a relatively compact site rather than a large monastic complex. What you get in return is a quiet, well-kept place with a layout you will not find at most ruins.