THROUGH THE PRIEST HOLE.....

Built in many of our grandest country homes to shelter Catholics from a vengeful Protestant Establishment, these ingenious hiding places are still occasionally being uncovered. A gripping new historical thriller delves into their secrets

- Laura Shepherd-Robinson

FATHER Garnet sat in the dark, hardly daring to breathe, listening to the tramp of soldiers' feet, as they tore Hindlip Hall apart searching for him. The priest hole in which he was concealed was just eight feet by five, and only about five feet high, accessed via a concealed door from a fireplace in the room above. Both Garnet and the Catholic gentleman sitting alongside him were suspected of involvement in Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

"After we had been in the hole seven days and seven nights and some odd hours," he later wrote, "every man may well think we were well wearied, and indeed so it was, for we generally sat, save that sometimes we could half stretch ourselves, the place not being high enough, and we had our legs so straightened that we could not, sitting, find place for them, so that we both were in continuous pain of our legs, and both our legs, especially mine, were much swollen."

În another part of the house, other Catholic plotters were similarly concealed, including a man whose name had become a legend among England's Catholics Nicholas Owen. A carpenter and architect, Owen had created the holes and hides at Hindlip and many more in other grand country houses across England.

His craftsmanship and ingenuity prevented the capture of many hundreds of Catholic priests, monks, and plotters at a time when religious belief was a matter of life and death.