The high road from the northern Sheffield suburbs to the village of High Bradfield is called Kirk Edge Road. Beyond the playing fields of Bradfield School, which are protected by a sturdy windbreak of trees, there is nothing but an expanse of green fields. Until the 1950s this was heather-coloured moorland, yet it’s still both bleak and beautiful.
There are no roadside buildings. Isolated farms, one of them called Spitewinter, are situated for shelter on south-facing slopes at a distance. After about 1½ miles travelling west, a substantial stone wall encloses trees which hide the Kirk Edge Convent, a community of Carmelite nuns, which bears the formal title Carmel of the Holy Spirit. (The name “Carmel” derives from Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the original founders of the order settled in the thirteenth century.)
It’s easy to drive past the place without realising it’s there. The modest lodge at the entrance gives no information about its name or purpose.
There was nothing on the site when Henry, 15th Duke of Norfolk acquired the Kirk Edge estate in 1869 for the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul to set up a boys’ industrial school with the unrealistic aim of teaching them agriculture on a patch of uncleared moorland.
The architect Miles Ellison Hadfield designed a building resembling a Parisian town house with high ceilings and large windows that was entirely unsuitable for a site eleven hundred feet above sea level on the edge of the Pennines. It was completed in 1871 and later extended with a west wing and chapel in 1885, by which time it had become an orphanage for up to two hundred girls.
Water-supply was a problem: well-water was hand-pumped to a tank in the roof space alongside a second rainwater tank, both of which froze solid in winter. Gales blew slates off the roof and snow lingered for weeks. The Duke of Norfolk provided coal, brought by cart from his collieries in Sheffield. The girls left in 1887.
For a brief period in 1900-01 the Liverpool priest Father Nugent brought boys from his orphanage to Kirk Edge. They too didn’t stay and the site remained unused except for providing summer holidays for poor Sheffield children until 1911 when the Duke, whose sister was a Carmelite nun, offered it to her order.
The Duke provided the nuns with improved facilities, including a new chapel, a windmill to pump the well-water and the boundary wall that provided the enclosure which their vocation required, but their living conditions were arduous until mains electricity was supplied in 1956 and mains water in 1964.
As far as possible the Convent was self-sufficient. The sisters each maintained a patch of garden to produce fruit and vegetables, and grew flowers for decoration. The Norfolk estate, and latterly a Sheffield businesswoman, provided food supplies, and the Convent attracted donations and discounts from the local community and Catholic supporters farther afield.
It’s difficult for people living ordinary lives, whether they’re religious or not, to understand the fervent attraction of monastic life in a closed order, free of distractions from focusing on the Almighty.
A postulant who visited Kirk Edge in 2012 provided an online illustrated description of the sisters and their routine of worship, contemplation and recreation: My Personal Visit Experience at Kirk Edge Carmel – Part I | Carmel, Garden of God and My Visit Experience to Kirk Edge Carmel – Part II | Carmel, Garden of God.
The inexorable decline in the number of postulants has obliged the sisters to close the Convent and move elsewhere, and the buildings are up for sale. For the first time there are images in the public domain that indicate the quality of Miles Hadfield’s buildings, which are not listed: 28 bedroom character property for sale in High Bradfield, Bradfield, Sheffield, S6.
Whoever takes over the property will need a supply of shovels, grit and thermal underwear, without doubt.