You leave the open country behind and drop into the shelter of wooded hills, and there below you lie the pale ruins of Mount Grace: a huge, quiet square of grass ringed by the roofless outlines of tiny separate houses. It looks like nothing else on your whole walk. This was a place built for silence, where men chose to live alone, side by side, and never meet.
And one of their little houses has been rebuilt so completely that you can step inside and stand where a hermit once stood. Mount Grace is the best-preserved of England's Carthusian charterhouses, founded in 1398 at the foot of these hills. The Carthusians were the most austere of all the monastic orders, and their way of life was unlike any other.
Where most monks shared a dormitory, a refectory and a common round of daily work, each Carthusian lived as a hermit, entirely alone, in his own two-storey house with its own walled garden, and all these little houses were ranged around one enormous cloister. A monk ate, prayed, slept, studied and gardened in solitude, coming together with his brothers only for occasional services in the church.
It was a life of deliberate, chosen silence, and it produced a community famous across medieval England for its holiness. Look for four things as you explore. First, the great cloister itself, far larger than in any other kind of monastery, because it had to be big enough to give each hermit his own house and garden around its edge.
Second, look at the individual cells, or rather the ground plans of them, ranged in a row: each was a small house on two floors, with a workshop, a living room, a study and a covered walk in its private garden. Third, and this is the treasure of the place, find the one reconstructed cell, rebuilt and furnished and planted as it would have been, so you can walk in and feel the scale of a single monk's whole world.
And fourth, look beside the doorway of each cell for the clever L-shaped serving hatch, an angled little tunnel through the wall. That hatch is worth pausing on, because it tells you everything about this life. Each monk's meals were brought to him and passed through that right-angled opening in the wall beside his door.
The angle was the whole point: because the hatch turned a corner, the monk inside could take his food without ever seeing the hand that delivered it, and the servant outside never saw him. Even the simple act of being fed was arranged so that solitude need never be broken.
Picture it: a single monk, day after day, year after year, praying and reading and tending his small garden in complete quiet, his only glimpse of another soul the shared worship in the church. Step into that reconstructed cell and the silence is almost a physical thing, a life so different from your own long open days on the trail that it stops you where you stand.
There is a grand house here too, at the gatehouse end, for after the monasteries were dissolved the priory buildings were partly turned into a country home, and its handsome rooms make a curious companion to the hermits' silent cells. Do take a little care among the older ruins as you look, keeping to the paths and treating the fragile walls and the planted cell with respect.
From Mount Grace the Coast to Coast climbs up onto the high edge of the moors, and over the coming miles it carries you eastward along the great escarpment of the Cleveland Hills towards a wild jumble of rock called the Wainstones, next on your walk. Take one last look down over that silent green cloister and its ring of empty little houses, and carry a little of its stillness with you as you climb. Walk safe.
