The Priory of Douglas was a small monastery of nuns, founded sometime under the reign of Rǫgnvaldr Guðrøðarson, King of the Isles, who ruled from 1187 to 1226. It was not a wealthy house. The Isle of Man itself was a contested prize in that century, passed between Norse and Scottish kings, and its religious communities were modest affairs of stone and turf. Robert the Bruce came in 1313 not as a pilgrim but as an invader, taking the island from the English. That he chose to spend the night before battle in a nunnery is the kind of detail that the medieval chroniclers loved: a king at prayer, perhaps, or simply a king availing himself of the best lodging within reach of his target. Castle Rushen fell to him in early June.

The priory was suppressed in 1540, swept away with the rest of the religious houses by Henry VIII's reformation. Nothing of the monastic buildings remains today except St. Bridget's Chapel, which spent the centuries after the dissolution as a coach house. What happened next reads like the plot of a quiet historical novel: Richard Calcot, Comptroller of the Isle of Man, acquired the buildings and, according to tradition, married Margaret Goodman - the last Prioress. Whether love or convenience, the marriage knitted the old religious community into the secular landowning class of the island. Calcot's family lived on the site until their descendants, the Heywoods, sold it to the Taubmans in 1776.

In 1823 John Taubman commissioned a new mansion in the Strawberry Hill Gothic Revival style - the same imaginative medievalism that Horace Walpole had pioneered at his own Strawberry Hill villa in Twickenham. The Nunnery's designers were John Pinch the elder and his son, John Pinch the younger, both of Bath. The result is a country house that pretends, very politely, to be a castle: pointed arches, battlements, decorative tracery, the whole vocabulary of Gothic borrowed for domestic comfort. In 1846, the explorer and colonial administrator George Taubman Goldie was born in this house. He would later play a central role in the British expansion into what became Nigeria.

St. Bridget's Chapel was restored to religious use in the 1880s and served as a place of worship for over a century. Then, in 1998, new owners evicted the congregation and the building was deconsecrated. The following year, the estate was acquired by the Isle of Man International Business School, and in 2008 the Isle of Man University Centre was established there - now part of University College Isle of Man. From 1999 until 2016, the Nunnery also housed Culture Vannin, the body charged with safeguarding Manx language and heritage, before its relocation to St. John's. Students walked the grounds where nuns once kept silence, where a Scottish king once slept before battle, where a Victorian explorer was born into colonial wealth - until UCM relocated its courses from the estate in 2025. The name has outlasted everyone.