Qualla: Quarr Abbey

Quarr Abbey: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5. In September 1901, almost an entire French Benedictine community boarded boats at Solesmes, crossed the Channel, and disembarked at a country house called Appuldurcombe on the Isle of Wight. The new French law that had driven them out gave no exceptions and no warnings. What they did not yet know was that they were about to build, from Belgian brick and Flemish know-how, one of the most daring church buildings of the twentieth century - on the site of an English abbey their order had already lost once before, six centuries earlier.

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Image: Andreas Trepte | CC BY-SA 2.5

Quarr Abbey: Stone From a Quarry

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ITookSomePhotos, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name is the giveaway. Quarr comes from quarry, and the quarry came first. In 1132 Baldwin de Redvers, the fourth Lord of the Isle of Wight, founded a Cistercian house here and called it the Abbey of Our Lady and St John, drawing on the local stone that had already, by then, b...

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Image: ITookSomePhotos | CC BY-SA 4.0

Quarr Abbey: Undone, Then Quarried Again

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Knight, CC BY-SA 2.0. Henry VIII's commissioners arrived in 1536. A Southampton merchant named George Mills bought the land and pulled the abbey down for its building stone, which went to fortify Cowes and Yarmouth against the threat of French invasion that the dissolution itself had helped to invite....

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Image: Garry Knight | CC BY-SA 2.0

Quarr Abbey: Exile to a Garden

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisandrew, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 1 July 1901, the French parliament passed a new law that ended decades of uneasy tolerance toward religious orders. Abbot Paul Delatte of Solesmes had been preparing for this for years, quietly sending a monk to England to look for a refuge. The community took Appuldurcombe Ho...

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Image: Lisandrew | CC BY-SA 4.0

Quarr Abbey: Brick That Glows

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisandrew, CC BY-SA 4.0. Among the Solesmes monks was a 31-year-old architect named Dom Paul Bellot. He drew the plans himself, and from 1907 a workforce of three hundred islanders - most of whom had built only ordinary houses - raised refectory, cloister, and church from Belgian brick that turns coral-p...

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Image: Lisandrew | CC BY-SA 4.0

Quarr Abbey: Days Marked by Bells

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today fewer than a dozen monks live the regular life. The hours run from Vigils at 5:30 to Compline at 8, with Mass at 9 on weekdays and 10 on Sunday. Father Nicholas, the guestmaster, is also the abbey's bookbinder and its beekeeper - each monk gathers two or three offices along...

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Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

Quarr Abbey: What the Quarry Returned

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2021 Historic England granted £229,817 for roof and window repairs - the same building Bellot raised in eighteen months in 1907 still requires patient attention. The ruined medieval walls of Baldwin de Redvers' original house remain a short walk from the new church, weathered ...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0