A small quadrilateral platform enclosed by a wide moat, slightly banked on both lips. The site of an alien priory, founded by the Empress Matilda as a cell of St Nicholas, Angers, and probably extinct as a community before the end of the 14th century. {1} A small moated site at the bottom of a slope comprising a platform with wide moat about 1 to 1.5m deep except at the south side where it is shallower. The platform has an irregular surface and the sides of the moat are fairly well covered with hawthorn bushes, except on the south side. There is some erosion around the base. The ditches are dry at present but get boggy during winter. {2} A rectangular moat at the south side of the area, but very overgrown, about 10m by 20m in area. Subdued earthworks in the rest of the field except for a probable fishpond at the north-west 2m deep and 14m long. {3} Monks Garth lies on the south-east edge of Willoughton village and was the site of a grange of the alien priory of St Nicholas at Angers, endowed before about 1115 with the land of the Domesday manor of Waldin the Engineer. It seems unlikely that a priory of monks was ever created here; it is described as the manor belonging to the abbot and convent of St Nicholas in all the detailed documentary references and its demise in 1392 was in the name of the abbot and convent directly. The manor was granted to King's College, Cambridge in 1441. In the 14th and 15th centuries the tithes of 'the hamlet of helpesthorp' (HER no.50933) formed an adjunct to the manor. The surviving earthwork remains consist of a rectangular moat up to 2m deep surrounding a small platform which is almost completely occupied by what appear to be foundations of a large building. The platform has been artificially raised by up to 1m above the surrounding land, in part levelled against the slope. The large external bank on the north, up to 0.75m high, might have functioned as a dam. A channel leads north-west from the moat into a small pond and then at right angles into a large pond surrounded on its sides and downslope end by broad banks; a slight channel at the north-west corner allows overspill into the village beck. A series of narrow ditches, in part relating to surviving close boundaries, mark out paddocks or closes around the moat; those to the east and the ridge-and-furrow further to the east of them have been largely obliterated by a cricket pitch. {7}