Priest Hole - Nicholas Owen

Nicholas Owen

Many such hiding places are attributed to a Jesuit lay brother, Nicholas Owen, who devoted the greater part of his life to constructing these places to protect the lives of persecuted priests. They were sometimes built, as at East Riddlesden Hall, as an offshoot from a chimney or behind panelling, for example in Ripley Castle and Harvington Hall (Worcestershire) and in North Yorkshire. Others were incorporated into water closets, for example at Chesterton Hall, near Cambridge.

With incomparable skill Owen knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls and bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings. But what was much more difficult of accomplishment, he so disguised the entrances to these as to make them most unlike what they really were. Moreover, he kept these places so close a secret that he would never disclose to another the place of concealment of any Catholic. He alone was both their architect and their builder. No one knows how many he made. Some may still be undiscovered.

After the Gunpowder Plot, Owen himself was captured at Hindlip Hall, Worcestershire, taken to the Tower of London and tortured to death on the rack. He was canonised as a martyr in 1970.