Breathtaking Stonyhurst
Our plucky crew crossed a few fields, dotted with sheep – the Bible’s favorite animal -- and navigated through three kissing gates. Then, like a dream rising from a field, suddenly we spotted the towers of the ancient college of Stonyhurst. Tolkien’s son attended here, providing him with all the scenery needed to create the Shire of Middle Earth.
Stonyhurst’s magnificent spire-capped cupolas -- four of them, arranged in pairs – make us stop in our tracks. I couldn’t resist the temptation to blurt out in my best Peter Jackson brogue: “The Two Towers!”
Were these the Two Towers? Some say that the spire at the Birmingham Oratory, seen from a distance, drew a marked contrast to its nearby Anglican cousin, and that this was Tolkien’s inspiration. (Tolkien attended the Oratory School as a boy and was taught by the then-Bishop, Blessed John Newman.) Tolkien was also inspired by the tragic Catholic history of the place, which begins in 1200 when “Stanihurst Hall” is constructed; by 1373 Stanihurst was Stonyhurst, cared for by Richard Shireburn, the ancestor of our hosts at the Shireburn Inn.
During the reign of Elizabeth and on through the centuries that followed, the noble Shireburns never gave up the Faith and, it is said, always maintained Catholic education in secret wherever they could. The Jesuits returned in 1800 and by the turn of the next century, Stonyhurst had become the most popular Catholic college in England.
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