Every so often a location comes along that slaps you in the face and puts it's hands down your pants for a little rummage. Somewhere that surprises you so much it becomes an instant favourite. I had been on the road with three of my friends - well two friends and one now ex-friend (long story) - on my last weekend in the States and one of them suggested this place. I had never even heard of it before but he said he'd been before and it was a cool spot. I trust him implicitly and he didn't let me down with this one!
This building is just one part of a much larger, very active site. It was originally a monastery but undertook a role as a hospital and retreat in later years, eventually closing around a decade ago although I'm certain the church and the retreat part has been closed a lot longer. It's a stunning building that I wish I'd taken some outside shots of, but I forgot like normal.
The building is a peculiar shape, dominated at one end by a huge church, and there is a secondary chapel on an upper floor. Parts of the building are modernised and still have power so the lights all work, and parts of it are sat in a gorgeously decayed state with loose floor tiles that raise a racket under every step. To top it off the basement contains one of the coolest artifacts I've ever seen - something that was on my photography bucket list and would make the youtube video bellends have kittens.
Yes, that is an Iron Lung. For the youngsters out there an Iron Lung is the colloquial name for a negative pressure ventilator, used to enable Polio sufferers to breathe normally. This one, although covered in stupid marker pen scribbles, is pretty much complete. Once the Polio vaccination came about, Iron Lungs became almost completely redundant although they can still be used in a handful of scenarios. As such pretty much all of them were broken up for scrap and destroyed, with the surviving examples confined to medical museums and, very very rarely, abandoned in hospital basements. There was another abandoned hospital in the north-east area which had a trio of them for years but they were removed and are now in a museum, which I suppose is a good thing but bad as I missed them!
Thanks for looking
This building is just one part of a much larger, very active site. It was originally a monastery but undertook a role as a hospital and retreat in later years, eventually closing around a decade ago although I'm certain the church and the retreat part has been closed a lot longer. It's a stunning building that I wish I'd taken some outside shots of, but I forgot like normal.
The building is a peculiar shape, dominated at one end by a huge church, and there is a secondary chapel on an upper floor. Parts of the building are modernised and still have power so the lights all work, and parts of it are sat in a gorgeously decayed state with loose floor tiles that raise a racket under every step. To top it off the basement contains one of the coolest artifacts I've ever seen - something that was on my photography bucket list and would make the youtube video bellends have kittens.
Yes, that is an Iron Lung. For the youngsters out there an Iron Lung is the colloquial name for a negative pressure ventilator, used to enable Polio sufferers to breathe normally. This one, although covered in stupid marker pen scribbles, is pretty much complete. Once the Polio vaccination came about, Iron Lungs became almost completely redundant although they can still be used in a handful of scenarios. As such pretty much all of them were broken up for scrap and destroyed, with the surviving examples confined to medical museums and, very very rarely, abandoned in hospital basements. There was another abandoned hospital in the north-east area which had a trio of them for years but they were removed and are now in a museum, which I suppose is a good thing but bad as I missed them!
Thanks for looking
