Stapehill Abbey

Stapehill Abbey stands in Dorset, eastern England, a former Trappistine monastery founded in 1802 and closed in 1991. It lies east of Wimborne Minster, about 25 kilometres from the older Trappist house at Lulworth. The community began when nuns returned from Russian exile and settled in Hammersmith before moving to Dorset. The first superior, Augustin de Chabannes, arrived with three professed sisters, one junior nun and five novices. The house was officially founded under the name Holy Cross Abbey by Jean-Baptiste Desnoyers, who was also prior at Lulworth. The monastery became independent of its original reformer, Augustin de Lestrange, in 1824 after high mortality among the strict observance nuns. Augustin de Lestrange himself took refuge there during the Hundred Days in 1815. In 1932 Stapehill founded Glencairn Abbey in Ireland under its second abbess, Maura Perry. After nearly two centuries the nuns left in 1991 for a new foundation at Whitland in Wales, leaving the Dorset site empty. Visitors find a quiet field and the low remains of the abbey walls, with no buildings still standing above ground. The site is marked by a simple wooden cross and a few information panels. Nearby Wimborne Minster offers a fine medieval church and small town centre. The Dorset countryside around is gentle, with lanes and farmland leading to the coast at Lulworth. The abbey’s story is told through local history groups and in published studies of the Trappistine order.