Arthington

Arthington is a small village in Wharfedale, in the City of Leeds metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. It is a civil parish, which according to the 2001 census had a population of 561 and is in the LS21 (Otley) postcode district.

It used to be a railway junction, where the line to Pool-in-Wharfedale, Otley, Ilkley, and on to Skipton joined the Leeds to Harrogate line.

It is at the northern end of the Bramhope Tunnel. There is a memorial to the workers killed digging the tunnel near the church in Otley. The railway then crosses the dramatic stone Arthington Viaduct over the River Wharfe.

The Arthington Priory

The village was the site of one of only two Cluniac Nunneries in England - the other being at Delapré Abbey in Northampton.

The Cluniac order was a branch of the Benedictines and fell under the rule of the great abbey at Cluny in Burgundy; the Benedictine order was a keystone to the stability that European society achieved in the 11th century, and partly owing to the stricter adherence to a reformed Benedictine rule, Cluny became the acknowledged leader of western monasticism from the later 10th century. A sequence of highly competent abbots of Cluny were statesmen on an international stage. The monastery of Cluny itself became the grandest, most prestigious and best endowed monastic institution in Europe. The height of Cluniac influence was from the second half of the 10th century through the early 12th.

The Cluniac Prayer

"O God, by whose grace thy servants the Holy Abbots of Cluny, enkindled with the fire of thy love, became burning and shining lights in thy Church: Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of love and discipline, and may ever walk before thee as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever."