Perched on the edge of the North York Moors National Park, commanding panoramic views which can stretch as far as the Pennine hills, is a historical treasure veiled from view. Following the Cleveland Way out of the village of Osmotherley, you will be led uphill to some steep steps leading to a small structure obscured by a clustered tree plantation. This is the Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Grace, known locally as Osmotherley’s Lady Chapel. Alleged to have been first constructed by a Carthusian prior from nearby Mount Grace Priory (which is literally just at the foot of the hill) in the 15th century, though the majority of the current building appears to date from the 16th, it is a small, single-cell chapel of random coursed stone, and of unknown origins.
During the Tudor era, there existed a hermitage here provided for by Henry VIII’s first wife, Katharine of Aragon, which a former Franciscan, Thomas Parkinson, entered. Shortly afterwards, John Wilson, the last prior of Mount Grace, was granted a pension and given the Lady Chapel in perpetuity. The chapel thus continued as a Catholic shrine and even saw persecution of some of its devotees during James I’s reign.
But with numbers depleting over the subsequent centuries, and following Catholic emancipation in 1829, secular clergy served the chapel though it faced consistent bouts of vandalism, so much so that a lady called Flora Morrish stepped in. Morrish contacted the landowner to request the right to inhabit the chapel and care for it.
Faced with an uncertain future after this, and sometime after the priory ruins were vested with the National Trust, local men Lord Eldon and Ralph Scrope purchased the chapel and established a trust to oversee its restoration. They appointed a York architect responsible for restoring the Shrine of Margaret Clitheroe to help and work began to preserve this historic asset.
In 1985, a Blessed Sacrament Chapel was additionally constructed using the remains of the old hermitage and featuring a small cloister connecting it the Lady Chapel. The site is now under the pastoral care of St Mary’s Cathedral, Middlesbrough.
Address: Monastery of Our Lady of Mt Grace, 18 N End, Osmotherley, Northallerton DL6 3BB
Books by Dr Emma Wells
