As a youth, in 1851, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones visited the fledgling monastery while staying with relatives close by. The experience was to have a profound impact on him and forty-five years later he wrote: "I get no time to myself - not five minutes ever in the day- and I am growing angry. ... More and more my heart is pining for that monastery in the Charnwood Forest. Why there? I don't know, only that I saw it when I was little and have hankered after it ever since". After his death in 1898, his widow wrote: "Though it is doubtful whether he ever saw the place again with his bodily eyes, the thought of it accompanied him throughout his whole life. Friends, wife, and children all knew the undercurrent of longing for the rest and peace which he thought he had seen there that day; he did not disguise it from them, and in his later years often spoke of the dream which had walked step by step with him ever since, of somehow leaving every one and everything and entering its doors and closing them behind him."