Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Buckfast Abbey, because it won’t be on any list of England’s great medieval architectural gems, and that’s because it was only built in the early part of the 20^th century. Mind you, its history goes back a lot further than that.

In fact, the first Benedictine Abbey at Buckfast was here before William the Conqueror, but where it was located exactly, nobody seems to know. I don’t think anybody knew what happened to it either, but what we do know, is that King Stephen gave Buckfast to the Abbot of Savigny, who built an abbey for his own followers on the current site sometime between 1134 and 1136. It’s all very well being given some land, but building an abbey and looking after it costs money, and by 1147, the abbey’s finances were so precarious that they had little choice but to join forces with the Cistercian Order.

In 1539, like so many other monasteries, Buckfast became a victim of the Dissolution, and what was left fell into decay – and that’s pretty much how it remained until Samuel Berry, a local mill owner, took it over in 1800. He demolished what was left, and then built a mansion for himself and a woollen mill for the sheep (or at least somewhere to leave their coats). The rest of the 19^th century saw the site change hands several times, but when a Dr. James Gale decided to sell it in 1882, he was hopeful that the purchaser would be someone who could return the estate back into its original use, and within six weeks Benedictine monks were back at Buckfast.

The monks who acquired the property were exiles from the Abbaye Saints-Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire in France. That’s a bit of a mouthful I know, but with financial help from Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, they were able to build a temporary church and start changing the former mansion into living quarters.

In 1902, Buckfast was reinstated as an abbey, with Boniface Natter becoming its first abbot. His wish to build a new abbey church was never realised, as he was one of the 300-400 passengers who died on board the SS Sirio which was famously wrecked off the Spanish coast in August 1906.

Also on board was his travelling companion, Anscar Vonier, who not only survived, but also became the next abbot. Vowing to fulfil his predecessor’s wishes, he immediately set about building a new abbey over the remains of the previous Cistercian monastery.

The amazing thing though, is that due to a lack of cash, it was the abbots themselves who did all the building work. After thirty years of hard work, the scaffolding came down just two weeks before Anscar’s death on 26^th December 1938.

Anscar is buried inside the abbey and visitors are welcome to visit free of charge. It may not rank as one of the most spectacular religious houses you’ve ever seen, but you can’t help but marvel at what a handful of monks achieved in such a relatively short space of time, and with very little money. Whatever you do though, make sure you don’t miss the Blessed Sacrament Chapel with its stained-glass window.

It needs money to keep a place like this going of course, and the farm helps to sustain their needs to some extent. Cattle and pigs provide an income and apiarists may well have heard of the Buckfast Bee, but the most lucrative product by far is their Buckfast Tonic Wine.

The monks started producing this fortified drink in the 1890s and is based on a traditional French recipe. Apparently, it was originally sold as a medicine with the maxim “Three small glasses a day, for good health and lively blood”. I’m not quite sure why, but in 1927, the Abbey lost its licence to sell it, and as a result, the Abbots gave permission for wine merchants to distribute it on their behalf.

Caffeine was added to the ingredients, and the drink became less of a medicine and more of a medicated wine, which found favour with an element of society who shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the stuff.

Scotland seems to have had a particular problem with Buckie, as it’s called north of the border. The drink may have gone down well with the teenagers of Glasgow, but it didn’t go down well with the Strathclyde police. With an alcoholic content of 15% proof, and a caffeine equivalent of eight cans of cola, it was the ideal liquid for local youths to accompany their battered Mars Bars before going on a destructive rampage around town.

It got so bad that there was a call for the drink to be banned, which is saying something when you consider the amount of whisky that is drunk up there. The monks and their distributors, Chandler & Co, naturally refused to accept responsibility for the fact that Buckie bottles were used as weapons 114 times over a three year period. To help the situation though they produced a batch of 16,000 cans – which sold out within a month.

The drink is still as popular as ever, and not just in Scotland either. Ireland also seems to have a thirst for it, and the craze is starting to catch on with hipsters in England too. If you want to try it for yourself, you can pick up a bottle in the shop at Buckfast Abbey.

Assuming that you’re still ‘compos mentis’, you might now begin to understand why a fan group called “Wreck the Hoose Juice” decided to organise an event in 2015 celebrating the drink that helps keep Scottish magistrates in a job.

There doesn’t seem to be any sign of the popularity of the drink, or the event, diminishing just yet. Each May, a large number of pubs throughout Scotland participate in festivities that give reverence to what was essentially a medicinal drink made in a quiet Devon valley. Pubs in Ireland, England, Cyprus, the Caribbean and Australia have also started to join in, which is why, I suppose, it’s now called World Buckfast Day.

Buckfast Abbey may not be an architectural gem as such, but just imagine for a moment that the monks were drinking the same stuff in the same quantities as they have been in the Buckie Triangle (an area between Airdrie, Coatbridge and Bellshill). The mind boggles as to what the abbey would have ended up looking like, or even if it would have ever got built at all.

POSTED – MAY 2022