St Paul's Monastery, Jarrow

The home of the Venerable Bede, chronicler of the beginnings of English Christianity, Jarrow has become one of the best-understood Anglo-Saxon monastic sites. The Anglo-Saxon church - with the oldest dedication stone in the country, dated AD 685 - partly survives as the chancel of the parish church.

Its architectural remains in the original monastic churches and below-ground remains of the associated monastic complexes, exceptional both in quality and quantity, provide a visible link between the past world of late Roman antiquity and the coming world of the European Middle Ages. Its innovative architecture epitomizes the introduction of building in stone with Roman-style sculpture and coloured glass windows into the British Isles.

In its design, it was a key stepping-stone on the way to the greater formalisation of monastic claustral layouts, and communal as opposed to eremitic life, which accompanied the development of written monastic rules across Europe during the course of the next century, leading to the standard claustral layout which would come to dominate medieval European society and then be transferred to other parts of the world.

Twinned with the monastery of St Peter's some 14 miles away on the river Wear.