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The Community

The Cistercian community at Holy Cross Abbey, Whitland was originally founded at Stapehill, Dorset in October 1802, by a small group of nuns, who had fled the horror of the French Revolution, seeking asylum in England. However, the property in Dorset, including farm and farm-land, became too big for the present community to manage and in 1989 it was sold and we moved to Whitland, across the valley from where Bernard of Clairvaux had founded a monastery in 1141 and so we pick up the threads of Cistercian monastic tradition in a land of ancient Christian faith.