Crowland Abbey in 2009

As Susan Hibbins once put it in Lincolnshire Life:

Drive to Crowland Abbey along the lonely fen roads on a misty December afternoon as the dusk is falling and you feel as though you are driving into the past, when the world seemed to consist only of water and sky; where small, isolated communities clung to muddy islands that raised themselves a few feet out of the undrained fens. 

This was the world to which the former soldier Guthlac came in 699 AD, to one of the little islands – Crowland – where he would live and die, and where a great abbey would be built in his memory.

The abbey is now largely ruinous, but part of it serves as Crowland's parish church.