The Cloister

The Cloister. . , The Cloister , The large grass square in front of you was the monastery's cloister. It was surrounded by the monks' main living quarters. , Very little remains of these buildings today – the army demolished most of them for their stone in the 17th century. The whole site was then dug up in 1863 to make way for a huge brick magazine for storing ammunition. This in turn was demolished in the 20th century. , More recently, archaeologists have marked out the outlines of the monastic buildings on the ground. , Look closer ... , it is odd to see the little red bick building, like an ordinary house, on the right. Actually there used to be more houses next to it. They were built for the officers who ran the fort and for maimed soldiers – the rest of the soldiers lived together in barracks. , ( photo captions ) , This is Tynemouth in 1895.When the cloister area was dug up to build the ammunition store, no record of the original buildings was kept. As a result we know very little about the monastic buildings here. , This drawing is of a similar cloister at another monastery. It gives an impression of how this area may have looked when Tynemouth was a monastery.