You climb into a hushed and shadowed wood, and beneath your boots the ground turns to stone — worn, uneven steps, hundreds of them, curving up through the trees. These are the Nuns' Steps, and they were laid, and worn smooth, by the feet of Benedictine sisters walking to prayer more than eight hundred years ago. Below you, by the river, stands the old priory itself.
Marrick Priory was a Benedictine nunnery, founded around the year 1150 by a local lord named Roger de Aske. For nearly four centuries a small community of nuns lived and worshipped here, in this quiet fold of lower Swaledale beside the River Swale — farming, praying, keeping the rhythm of the religious day.
To reach their fields and the world beyond, and to move between the priory and the village of Marrick on the hill above, they climbed a paved causeway through the trees: the flight now known as the Nuns' Causeway, or simply the Nuns' Steps — some three hundred and seventy-five stone steps threading up through Steps Wood.
Then, in 1540, King Henry the Eighth's Dissolution of the Monasteries swept the nunnery away, as it swept away religious houses across all of England. The nuns were pensioned off and dispersed.
The buildings passed into other hands, were altered and rebuilt over the centuries, and today the much-changed site serves as an outdoor-education centre — still ringing, in its way, with young voices where once the sisters chanted their offices. The prayers changed; the purpose of gathering the young in this quiet dale did not.
Look, first, at the steps themselves as you climb — count them if you like, but notice how each one is dished and hollowed in the centre, worn down by countless feet across the centuries. Second, feel the wood around you: Steps Wood, cool and green and dim, the trees arching overhead, the path a stony ribbon winding up between them.
Third, look back and down through the branches to the priory beside the river — the tower, the long buildings, set in their green meadow by the Swale. Fourth, notice how the causeway was built, deliberately paved and stepped, a proper engineered path and not a mere sheep-track — a hint of the effort a small community poured into its daily life.
And fifth, when you emerge at the top, take in the wide view over lower Swaledale, the dale opening out and softening now, the wild moors behind you and gentler country ahead. Imagine the sisters on these steps.
Twice a day and more, in every season, in rain and frost and summer heat, black-habited nuns climbed and descended this same flight — to tend their fields, to reach the village, to carry the small business of the priory up and down the hill. For four hundred years their feet fell on these stones, and it is their feet, more than any mason's chisel, that shaped the hollows you are treading now.
When Henry's men closed the house and the community was scattered, the prayers stopped — but the steps remained, and every Coast to Coast walker who climbs them follows, quite literally and worn stone by worn stone, in the footsteps of the nuns of Marrick. The steps can be uneven and slippery under wet leaves, so take them steadily and watch your footing.
From here the Coast to Coast leaves the deep dales behind and follows the Swale eastward towards Richmond, with its great Norman castle rising above the river — the largest town on the whole walk, and the gateway to the gentler country beyond. Take one last look back down the Nuns' Steps into the green shade of the wood, and climb on out into the light. Walk safe.
