In the search for ever higher output power or energy from fibre oscillators or amplifiers a nowadays mature technology relies on enlarging the fibre mode area. Broadening of the core diameter, all other things being equal, inevitably yields a multimode fibre, thereby dramatically limiting the device usefulness. Various strategies have been deployed to design and manufacture single transverse mode fibre oscillators and amplifiers, among which making use of the so-called photonic bandgap effect to restrict the modal population seems promising. Helped by efficient and reliable numerical tools the design of large mode area singlemode photonic bandgap fibres is presented. Two fibres with 20-μm and 40-μm core diameter, both of them heavily doped with Yb3+ ions, have been fabricated by the widespread modified chemical vapour deposition process and are shown to behave properly when used as the core element of either continuous wave oscillators or femtosecond amplifiers. Good output beam quality (M2 parameter spanning from 1.12 to 1.5 for the set of fibres studied) and high slope efficiency of 80% in cw oscillation regime are demonstrated. Furthermore the 40-μm core diameter fibre is shown to be resilient to tight bending down to 7.5-cm radius. The stack-and-draw process makes it easy to tailor the outer cladding so that a large numerical aperture can be reached. Subsequently, from this air-clad fibre, 500 fs 47 W pulses at 35 MHz are obtained from a two-stage chirped pulse amplification system.