Inside the former St Clare's Abbey, now for sale for £3m in Darlington

The 170-year-old property on Carmel Road, once the home of the Poor Clares nuns, has now become a luxurious 10 bedroom property, which includes a gymnasium, spa, and an out-door all-weather horse arena and a football pitch.

St Clare's Court, Darlington. All modern pictures courtesy of agents Knight Frank

Plus it features the nuns’ magnificent chapel, which includes one of only three jubes in the country.

The last eight Poor Clares nuns (above) left St Clare’s Abbey in 2007, and in 2012, planning permission was granted to turn the complex into a 60-bed nursing home. It was put up for sale in 2015 for offers in excess of £1.5m, after which permission was granted to turn it into one large home with nine smaller dwellings around it.

Now it has been renamed St Clare’s Court, and the “smaller” homes with up to six bedrooms have been on the market for up to £700,000.

This week, the central large home, with six en suite bedrooms plus a further four based around the chapel.

The developers appear to have done a fine job, because Memories looked round the property when it was on the market in 2015 and, a part from the stunning chapel, it felt like a sterile, spartan Victorian institution. It was full of long, dank corridors with echoey wooden floors and desolate bedrooms featuring only a few beams and lots of dangling spiders’ threads. There were many original doors, windows, staircases and fireplaces, but above all there was a very musty smell.

But now it is the height of luxury.

The nuns who built it were the Order of Poor Clare Sisters. They fled from Rouen in 1795 to escape the French Revolution, and stayed first at Haggerston Castle in Northumberland before buying Scorton Hall in Scorton.

A second order of nuns, the Carmelites, were also driven from the Continent by the French Revolution. They settled first at Cocken Hall, near Durham, before buying Cockerton Field House, “a commodious mansion”, in Darlington. They enlarged it into a convent, with Nunnery Lane providing access to its front door.

In the 1850s, the Carmelites sold the southern 20 acres of the estate for £2,000 to the Poor Clares who were wanting to move out of Scorton.

The Poor Clares had a close connection with Joseph Aloysius Hansom, an architect from York.

One of Mr Hansom’s first designs was for a pioneering suspension bridge over the River Ure at Middleham (above), which opened in 1829. However, a year later, a herd of cows which were supposed to be ambling across it somehow organised themselves to march in time which caused such a vibration that a cable snapped catapulting a number of them into the river. Two drowned, although the modified bridge still carries traffic to this day.

Wisely, Mr Hansom steered clear of bridges after that, but when he had successfully built Birmingham Town Hall in 1831 he fell into bankruptcy because he had failed to take into account the cost of transporting the heavy stone from Anglesey.

The spa at St Clare's Court. Picture courtesy of Knight Frank

He began to revive his fortunes by patenting in 1834 the Hansom safety cab – a new type of horsedrawn carriage through which his name lives on to this day.

He then gained a reputation for building Gothic Catholic churches – Arundel Cathedral in Somerset is probably his most highly regarded work – and he assisted the Darlington sisters in choosing their plot for their new abbey. He helped them financially with the construction and for a while his daughter, Winny, was a pupil at their boarding school there.

Construction started on April 7, 1856, and was completed on November 14, 1857.

The contemplative nuns’ quarters were kept spartan in contrast to the elaborate chapel (below) which has an unusual jube as its key feature.

In many churches, the nave, where most of the congregation sits, is separated from the chancel – the part of the church reserved for the choir and clergy beside the altar – by steps and an ornately carved screen. This is known as the rood screen as it used to have a rood – or cross – above it, placing the cross at the centre of the service.

There are different types of rood screen, and we believe a jube is a screen that has stairs on either side of it and so is designed for a person, or a choir, to climb and stand on top of to deliver a reading or to sing a hymn.

Whatever it is, there are only three of them in the country.

Not that most Darlingtonians would know about it because for most of the last 170 years, St Clare’s Abbey has been cut off from the town by its tall, forbidding brick wall, and its arched gatehouse with its iron gate.

This created a secluded, tree-lined ground for the nuns to continue their contemplations in.

Sister Frances (above), the last abbess, told The Northern Echo from behind a wooden screen in June 2007 as she was preparing to leave for Hereford with her seven remaining nuns: "Even though we are near a busy road, it can be extraordinarily silent here. People notice it as soon as they come through the arch.”

Now this can be yours – if you have £3m to spare.

St Clare’s Court is listed with Knight Frank agents. Thanks to them for the modern photos