A COMMUNITY of nuns is preparing to move to a new multi-million pound monastery – the first to be built in the region for more than 400 years.

The Conventus of Our Lady of Consolation, a group of 25 Benedictine nuns, will move to the new building at Wass, near Helmsley, North Yorkshire, in the spring.

Contractors are hard at work on the monastery which is about 90 per cent complete, according to convent leader Abbess Andrea Savage.

The nuns decided to make the 200-mile move from their home at Stanbrook Abbey, in Worcestershire, as it had become too expensive to run.

Abbess Savage said the nuns were very excited about the change of scene.

She said: “We are all looking forward to it.

“Although some of the nuns are moving away from their families, some are moving closer.

“We have a nun who is originally from Scarborough, so she is moving closer to home.”

The community recently sold some of its possessions, raising more than £90,000 in readiness for the move.

Abbess Savage said: “We can’t take everything with us, but of course there were some things we decided were too precious to sell.

“We have saved some Mouseman furniture, which was made in Yorkshire in the first place.”

The nuns applied for planning permission for the monastery in 2004, with design and planning taking place throughout 2005 and 2006, and building starting in 2007.

Abbess Savage said: “We decided to move because we started evaluating our monastic living, which is split into three parts – prayer, spiritual reading and manual labour.

“We realised that the manual labour and the upkeep of our property was taking up too much of our time.

“Stanbrook Abbey is set in four acres of land. It was built in the 19th Century and it is five storeys high, so it takes a lot of maintenance and swallows up a lot of money.”

The new monastery will be ecologically friendly, with solar panels, rain water harvesting and reed bed sewerage.

The low-profile building will feature cells for each of the nuns, a chapel, a kitchen, a recitary, a novitiate – where trainee nuns will study – a laundry room and a sewing room.

It will also have a woodchip boiler.

Abbess Savage declined to reveal how much the building will cost, but said she expected it to be finished by March 1.