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Still more fortunately, the love of Turner for the Wharfe induced 
Ruskin to visit it, specially to look at the scenes painted by 
Turner and to write his own experiences of its beauties. There 
is no other abbey in England which has-been thus highly 
favoured, and in their company we may gain glimpses of beauty 
which otherwise we might have looked at without seeing. Turner 
came to the Wharfe when he was a comparatively young man. 
He had never before seen our northern scenery and its special 
beauty came upon him like a revelation. When he came to 
the North he seems instinctively to have sought out the most 
picturesque abbeys he could find, such as Whitby, Kirkstall, and 
Bolton. His keen eye for the picturesque was delighted with 
the glorious details of these lofty arches, noble pillars, carved 
fronts and masses of ruined stone lying ready for his foreground. 
Ruskin intimates that he was influenced by deeper considerations. 
‘ But on Whitby Hill and by Bolton Brook remained traces of 
other handiwork. Men who could build had been there; and 
who also had wrought, not merely for their own days. But to 
what purpose? Strong faith, and steady hands, and patient 
souls—can this then be all you have left! this the sum of your 
doing on the earth !—a nest where the night-owl may whimper 
to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of consumed arches, looming 
above the bleak banks of mist, from its cliff to the sea?’’ It is 
however doubtful whether Turner looked so far beneath the 
surface of what he saw either at Whitby or Bolton. Ruskin is 
really describing his own thoughts as he stood for the first time 
beside those abbeys when he came to wander in the footsteps of 
Turner. It is however a fact that Turner was deeply impressed 
by the Wharfe and Bolton Abbey. It is said that he never 
spoke of them without being visibly affected, and in his latter 
days he never referred to them without tears. There is much 
special beauty at Bolton Abbey which was likely to attract 
Turner. Ruskin’s description of the scene will make this plain. 
In his “ Modern Painters’ he says, ‘‘'The Abbey is placed, as 
most lovers of our English scenery know well, on a little 
promontory of level park land enclosed by one of the sweeps of 
the Wharfe. On the other side of the river the flank of the 
dale rises in a pretty wooded brow which the river has cut into 
two or three bold masses of rock, steep to the water’s edge, but 
feathered above with copse of ash and oak. Above these rocks 
the hills are rounded softly upwards to the moorland; the 
entire height of the brow towards the river being perhaps two 
hundred feet, and the rocky parts of it not above forty or fifty, 
so that the general impression upon the eye is that the hill is 
little more than twice the height of the ruins, or of the groups 
of noble ash trees which encircle them. One of these groups is 
conspicuous above the rest, growing to the very shore of the 
