St Augustine's Abbey was founded in 597 AD, the year Augustine himself arrived in Canterbury with 40 Benedictine monks sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English. Augustine is buried here, a matter of fact that gives the ruins a genuine weight: this crumbling honey-coloured stonework marks the resting place of the man who changed the country's religious course entirely.

The Normans demolished the original Saxon abbey after 1066 and replaced it with a church the size of the Cathedral. Henry VIII finished the job in 1538, stripping the stone and shipping it to Deal and Walmer for his coastal fortresses, some even reaching Calais. The magnificent Fyndon Gate survived only because Henry converted it into a Tudor palace for his honeymoon with Anne of Cleves, a plan that, like the marriage, didn't quite work out.

VoiceMap's Canterbury tours trace the abbey's extraordinary arc from burial ground of the Kings of Kent to royal pleasure palace, cockerel-fighting venue and brewery, connecting it to the wider story of how English Christianity began and what Henry's dissolution really cost.