In pictures: the £3m Darlington abbey as the nuns left it

Last week, we told how St Clare’s Abbey was sold by the last of its contemplative nuns in 2007 and we showed pictures of its conversion into an amazing residential development called St Clare’s Court. The 10-bedroom central section of the abbey, which features the chapel, has just gone on the market for £2.95m.

SEE MORE: THE CONVERTED ABBEY NOW FOR SALE IN DARLINGTON

The abbey was built in 1856 and 1857, and although the chapel is stunning – it features one of only three jubes in the country – the rest of the building was spartan, as was appropriate for the nuns who cut themselves off from the rest of the world to be closer to God.

The overgrown exterior of St Clare's Abbey in 2007 when the nuns left

These pictures from Pat Blewitt, taken just after the eight last nuns had left, show the abbey in its original form. It had few comforts – unlike the spa and jacuzzi that we pictured in the new development.

Outside, in a secluded corner amid mature trees, is the nuns’ graveyard (above). The earliest burial was in 1858, and the nuns lie beneath identical stone crosses (there is just one flat stone grave) on which nuns’ initials and the year of their deaths have been inscribed.

Marian Lewis, of Hutton Magna, visited the abbey in the 1960s when she worked as a carpet seamstress with Binns. She and her colleagues had to fit a red carpet in the chancel around the altar. In those days, there was no carpet glue, so Marian had to sew round all the edges of the carpet to stop it fraying, so the fitting took several days.

“We were locked in and I wasn’t allowed to speak to any of the nuns,” she remembers. “I wasn’t even allowed to go to the toilet, although the men were.

Inside the empty abbey before conversion. All pictures by Pat Blewitt

“It was an eery place. Everything echoed. Somewhere nuns must have been using buckets because you could hear them rattle when they moved them.”

The main feature of the chapel is the roodscreen that separates the altar area from the nave of the church where the congregation sat. The abbey’s roodscreen is actually a jube, which means choristers can access it from doors and sing from the top of it – this is what makes it so unusual.

Pat Blewitt's picture of the chapel with pews looking through the roodscreen, or jube, to the altar

“The roodscreen is nothing like it was then,” says Marian. “From your pictures, you can now walk beneath it to the altar but then the altar was closed off.

“In between the pillars of the roodscreen were iron grills. They took one out so the nuns could pass us a pot of tea in a brown enamel jug.

“The nuns wouldn’t give me the jug – it had to be taken by a man. We also got some biscuits that were very hard!”

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