Who would have thought that the accidental discovery, while out on a Sunday walk along the River Severn, that a run-down priory was for sale could end up costing so much? Not just financially and emotionally but also in terms of a private sense of loss – both aesthetically and, above all, in terms of my own sense of judgment.
Looking back, was my doomed quixotic quest to restore one of the great Cistercian estates of the Midlands in the months running up to my 50th birthday just a madcap middle-age identity crisis? A subterranean retirement fantasy escape to the familiar arched cloisters, pointed-arch windows, Romanesque colonnades of the monastic buildings in which I spent much of my boyhood and teenage years (Jesuit and Benedictine)?
