St Beuno’s Ignatian Spirituality Centre

In 1832, Following the Act of Catholic Emancipation of 1829, the Jesuits came to North Wales and founded St Winefride's Church in nearby Holywell, Flintshire. In 1846, Fr Randal Lythgoe, the Provincial of the Jesuits in Britain, visited Holywell and toured the neighbouring area. When he came to Tremeirchion, to see farm land which the Jesuits owned, he quickly resolved that this should be the site for a new college to train Jesuit recruits for the priesthood. The college was named after a local saint, St Beuno.

St Beuno's was designed by the architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom, known for the Hansom cab. He went on to design many churches for the Jesuits, such as the Oxford Oratory, St Walburge's Church in Preston. In the late 1870s, Gerard Manley Hopkins while studying there, described the building, as "built of limestone, decent outside, skimping within, Gothic like Lancing College done worse." Originally, St Beuno's College was a quadrangle enclosing a garden. The outside walls were made of stone, with Gothic gargoyles and stone carving, and inside were broad corridors and large but simple rooms. There were classrooms, a library, parlour and recreation room, all connected by a basement corridor on…