Delapré Abbey

Delapré was founded in the reign of King Stephen by Simon de Senlis, son of the Earl of Northampton who had founded the Cluniac priory of St Andrew in the town. Endowed with some 3,060 acres and the rectories of Earls Barton, Great Doddington and Fotheringhay — with Wollaston and Filgrave added by Edward I — the house typically held a dozen to twenty nuns at any one time, supervised directly from the great abbey at Cluny in Burgundy. From its first foundation it gave 21s. 8d. yearly to the poor in money, bread and fish, and each Easter Monday the Guild of Weavers processed from Northampton to offer tapers before the images of the Trinity and Our Lady.

Two moments mark the abbey's grounds above all others. In December 1290 the body of Eleanor of Castile, embalmed at Lincoln and bound for Westminster, rested at Delapré for the night while Edward I stayed at Northampton Castle; the following day the ground at the top of the hill was consecrated and an Eleanor cross raised there, begun in 1291 by John of Battle with statues carved by William of Ireland. Then, on 10 July 1460, the Battle of Northampton was fought on the abbey land between the river and the house. Henry VI was captured and spent that night at the abbey as a prisoner, while the nuns tended the wounded. It is believed many of the battle-dead were buried in the nuns' graveyard — now the walled garden — though there is no archaeological evidence for it; graves were, however, discovered during the garden's construction.

The abbey surrendered to the Crown in 1538. The Tate family bought the grounds and laid out Elizabethan gardens; the Bouveries, who purchased the estate in 1756 for £22,000, built most of what stands today and reshaped the grounds in the manner of Capability Brown. Miss Mary Bouverie returned to live here in 1914, moved out when the War Office took the house in 1940, came back to a room over the stables in 1942 and died in January 1943. After proposals to demolish the building, funds raised by the Northamptonshire Record Society saved it, and the Record Office opened here in 1959. The Delapré Abbey Preservation Trust now manages the Grade II* listed buildings.

The main house reopened at the end of 2017 for tours, educational visits and weddings, with a heritage shop and café overlooking the grand courtyard that opened the same year. Allow time for the grounds as well as the rooms: they are a Scheduled Monument on account of their partial battlefield status, and the walk south-west across the meadows and tree-lined grounds brings you to the Eleanor cross, one of only three of the original twelve still standing. The walled garden, the Victorian rock and water gardens, the ha-ha and the surviving fruit-growing buildings all repay a slow circuit.

If you would rather see the place after dark, organised public ghost hunts are held at the venue; book a place with the organisers in advance rather than turning up hopefully. Whatever you do or don't experience, treat the battlefield and the walled garden as what they are: ground associated with real deaths, and worth a quiet moment.