St Joseph’s Seminary, Upholland.

Nestled away in the hills of Lancashire near Wigan, St Joseph’s opened as a priest training college for the Roman Catholic Church in 1883 and became one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Its immense structure boasts an observatory, an extensive and rare library, a taxidermist’s and even an 18-hole golf course. By 1975 St Joseph’s had fully ceased operating as a seminary and become home to the Northern Institute, providing a retreat and conference centre for the diocese under the leadership of Monsignor John Devine.

After 150 years of use by the northern Catholic Dioceses, the college saw its final closure in 1987.

My visit to the college was comparable to stepping into a beautifully preserved time warp complete with cascading spiralling staircases, endless mahogany shelves stacked with musty books written in Latin and religious paraphernalia strewn like autumn leaves across the abandoned dormitories.

Just down the road from St Joseph’s lies a convent and rumour has it that tunnels run underground connecting the two institutions; whilst I have not been able to verify this, a church located in UpHolland which was formerly a Benedictine monastery does indeed have tunnels running beneath the churchyard which were used as escape routes by the monks.