Denny Abbey was founded in 1159 as a Benedictine Monastery. It then became a retirement home for the Knights Templar and after their suppression, a Franciscan nunnery. After the Dissolution, it became a farm. In the 1960s the Abbey ruins were taken over by English Heritage and the farm became the Museum of Farmland Life.
During its time as a farm, the nuns’ refectory had been made into a barn, but when it was cleared out, the original floor tiles were found under all the muck. The other barn on the site is a timber framed, aisled barn with flint walls and a corrugated iron roof and is now the display area for the story of farming in the Fenlands.
