Where Nuns Once Roamed

The room that you see here is the Callow Great Hall, just a small part of Stanbrook Abbey, the former home to a closed order of Benedictine Nuns. The order was founded in 1625 in Cambrai, Flanders but after being deprived of their abbey during the French Revolution the nuns fled to England. In 1838 they settled in Stanbrook, Worcestershire, where a new abbey was built.

Jumping forward to modern times in 2009 the nuns completed a move from their Victorian Abbey to a new Stanbrook Abbey in Wass, Yorkshire. At this point the whole estate was put up for sale and just over a year later was purchased and converted into a luxury hotel and wedding venue. During this conversion care was taken to never lose sight of the buildings past.

This hall is now a unique and memorable venue for couples to get married in. You could almost believe that a nun could walk around a corner at any moment. The organ is still in full working order and if you were to go through the right hand archway you would find the Holy Thorn Chapel, a place that once housed the abbey's holy relics. A truly remarkable space.

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Europe / UK-England

Lat: 52° 8' 49.2" N
Long: 3° 15' 33.38" W

Elevation: 85 ft

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Taken with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G fisheye lens. Mounted on a Nodal Ninja 5 panoramic head and R-D16 rotator atop a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod. 9 bracketed shots (-4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4) taken at 6 positions 60° apart, tilted 15° down, another set of shots taken looking straight up and a final set of shots taken looking at where the tripod stood but from the side. Raw files then processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.7 before being blended into single views and stitched together using PTGui Pro 10.0.15 and converted using Pano2VR 4.5.3.