Culross Abbey stands on the hillside above the beautiful and fascinating village of Culross. It's about a third of a mile walk from the centre of the village and a 165ft climb, but the narrowness of the roads at the top of the hill still mean that you are best advised parking in one of the car parks in Culross and walking from there.
A visit to Culross Abbey can be a slightly puzzling experience, because a number of factors conspire to make it more difficult than you might expect to make sense of what you are seeing. One of these is the steep slope of the site, meaning that you are tending to be looking uphill from a basement level perspective much of the time. The second is that the cloister has been made into a garden for the manse, which itself has been made out of the north end of the west range.
The third is that the configuration of Culross Abbey Church (the subject of a separate feature) is no longer what it was during most of its monastic days, giving a very false impression when you try to line other remains up with it. And the last, and perhaps most important, is that the only interpretation board on the site shows the ground plan of the original abbey, but does not help relate that to the ruins you see around you.
Nonetheless, a visit is also a fascinating experience, in part because you need to think about what you are looking at. Access to "the Abbey" leads you past the now open south end of the west range of the cloister, complete with its vaulted ceilings at basement and ground floor level, and past the outside of the inner wall of the south range of the cloister at basement level. You end up in the remains of what would once have been the meeting of the east and south ranges, looking up past the foundations of the chapter house to the south transept of the abbey church.