Mount St Bernard Abbey
Mount St Bernard Abbey is the only Cistercian monastery in England and the first Catholic abbey to be founded in that country after the Reformation. Situated in the ancient forest landscape of Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, this remarkable religious community has been home to a community of Trappist monks since its foundation in the nineteenth century. The Trappists, formally known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, are renowned for their commitment to silence, prayer, and manual labour, and the abbey today remains an active, living monastery rather than a heritage ruin or visitor attraction. That combination of genuine religious purpose and extraordinary historical significance gives the place an atmosphere quite unlike almost anything else in England.
The story of Mount St Bernard begins with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which allowed Catholics to once again openly practise their faith and establish institutions in England. Almost immediately, the philanthropist Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, a fervent Catholic convert who owned the surrounding Gracedieu estate, worked to bring a monastic community to Charnwood Forest. He acquired land and in 1835 invited a small group of Cistercian monks from France and Belgium to settle there. The community initially lived in very modest, even improvised conditions, but de Lisle was instrumental in commissioning the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin — the most celebrated Gothic Revival architect of the Victorian age — to design a proper abbey church. Pugin worked on the project in the early 1840s, and while the building was relatively austere even by his standards, it represented one of his most significant ecclesiastical achievements. The foundation stone of the church was laid in 1844, and the completed building was consecrated in 1845. The abbey was raised to the status of an abbey proper in 1849 when it received its first abbot, making it a landmark moment in the revival of English Catholicism.
The buildings themselves have a brooding, powerful character. Pugin designed the church and early monastic ranges in a restrained Gothic style, using the local Swithland slate and grey stone that gives the whole complex a markedly different appearance from the warm limestone abbeys of the English Midlands. The church interior is spare and austere, as befits the Cistercian tradition, with plain whitewashed walls, simple stone columns, and a quality of light that falls quietly through narrow lancet windows. Later buildings were added through the twentieth century and were designed by the architect Albert Herbert, whose work maintains the spirit if not always the strict letter of Pugin's vision. There is a sense of weight and permanence to the place, and visitors who enter the abbey church for the divine office — the series of sung prayers that punctuate the monks' day from the early hours of the morning to late evening — are often struck by the profound stillness and the resonant plainchant that echoes through the stone interior.
One of the most remarkable chapters in the abbey's more recent history is its foray into commercial brewing. In 2018, after years of producing and selling their famous Tynt Meadow English Trappist Ale, Mount St Bernard became the first Trappist brewery in England and the eleventh in the world to receive the authentic Trappist product certification. The decision to brew was driven partly by financial necessity, as the community sought a sustainable income to maintain both the abbey and its aging population of monks. The beer — a dark, full-bodied ale brewed according to Trappist principles within the walls of the monastery — became an instant object of interest among beer enthusiasts worldwide and helped draw wider attention to the community. The brewing operation continues today, though quantities are deliberately limited and the ale is not always easy to find.
Charnwood Forest, in which the abbey sits, is itself a landscape of considerable geological and ecological interest. The forest is one of the oldest exposed rock outcrops in England, with Precambrian rocks — among the most ancient in the British Isles — breaking through the surface in great ridges and tors. The landscape is one of bracken and birch, rocky outcrops, ancient woodland, and rough grazing land, punctuated by reservoirs and small villages. The abbey sits within its own farmland and grounds, and the sense of rural remoteness is real even though the towns of Coalville and Loughborough are only a few miles away. The ruins of nearby Gracedieu Priory, a medieval Augustinian nunnery associated with the same estate that gave Mount St Bernard its land, lie just a short distance away and offer another layer of historical resonance to the area.
Visiting Mount St Bernard requires a degree of preparation and an understanding that this is above all a working monastery. The abbey church is generally open to visitors who wish to attend the divine office or simply to pray in quiet, and there is a well-stocked shop selling the Trappist beer, spiritual books, incense, and other goods produced or curated by the monks. Day retreatants and those seeking a more extended stay at the guesthouse can arrange accommodation through the abbey's retreat programme, which offers visitors the opportunity to participate more fully in the rhythm of monastic life. The abbey is reached by narrow country lanes from Coalville and there is a small car park for visitors. Public transport options are limited, and most visitors arrive by car. The grounds are perhaps best experienced in the quieter seasons — late autumn and winter give the stone buildings and surrounding forest a suitably contemplative character — though summer visits, when the farmland is full of life and the evenings are long, have their own appeal.
A detail that delights those who look into the abbey's history is the connection between Pugin and the monks during the design process. Pugin, notoriously headstrong and opinionated, had to negotiate carefully with the Cistercian community, who had their own strict views about appropriate architecture for their order. The result was a building more restrained than most of Pugin's other work, and some architectural historians consider it all the more powerful for that restraint. The abbey also holds an interesting place in the broader cultural history of English Catholicism, sitting alongside institutions like Downside and Ampleforth as evidence of the remarkable Victorian Catholic revival. For those with an interest in religious architecture, monastic history, the Trappist tradition, or simply in finding a genuinely unusual and quietly extraordinary place in the English countryside, Mount St Bernard repays a visit with something that is difficult to find almost anywhere else in the country.