| The Abbey was fascinating to the romantics of the late 18th Century, and the site is reputably haunted. |
The romantic appeal of Gothic ruins was written about by Horace Walpole and the poet Thomas Gray. Both men visited Netley in 1755 and Walpole wrote:
"The ruins are vast and retain fragments of Beautiful fretted roofs pendent in the air, with all variety of windows wrapped around with ivy - many trees are sprouted up amongst the walls, and only want to be increased with cypresses!...In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of paradise."
In 1790, William Sotheby wrote his Ode, Netley Abbey, Midnight:
Within the sheltered centre of the aisle,
Beneath the ash whose growth romantic spreads
Its foliage trembling o’er the funeral pile,
And all around a deeper darkness sheds;
While through yon arch, where the thick ivy twines,
Bright on the silvered tower the moon-beam shines,
And the grey cloister’s roofless length illumes,
Upon the mossy stone I lie reclined,
And to a visionary world resigned
Call the pale spectres forth from the forgotten tombs.
But now no more the gleaming forms appear,
Within their graves at rest the fathers sleep,
And not a sound comes to the wistful ear,
Save the low murmur of the tranquil deep:
Or from the grass that in luxuriant pride
Waves o’er yon eastern window’s sculptured side,
The dew-drops bursting on the fretted stone:
While faintly from the distant coppice heard
The music of the melancholy bird
Trill to the silent heaven a sweetly-plaintive moan.
William Lisle Bowles wrote his fourteen sonnets in 1789, one of which was Netley Abbey:
Fallen pile! I ask not what has been thy fate;
But when the winds. slow wafted from the main,
Through each rent arch, like spirits that complain,
Come hollow to my ear, I meditate
On this world's passing pageant, and the lot
Of those who once majestic in their prime
Stood smiling at decay, till bowed by time
Or injury, their early boast forgot,
They may have fallen like thee! Pale and forlorn,
Their brow, besprent with thin hairs, white as snow,
They lift, still unsubdued, as they would scorn
This short-lived scene of vanity and woe;
Whilst on their sad looks smilingly they bear
The trace of creeping age, and the pale hue of care!
The Supernatural and the Abbey:
Thomas Gray in 1764 wrote "I should tell you, that the ferryman who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he would not for all the world pass a night at the Abbey, there were such things seen near it!"
On a Summer's day in 1970, one of two ladies dowsing in the Abbey grounds saw a figure dressed as a monk, beckoning and pointing towards the Abbey as if to convey something to her. Her friend, while sensing a presence, saw nothing.
People going into the ruins at night have reputably seen an apparition floating over the sacristy. In 1981 a couple camping in the ruins were awakened by a sudden drop in temperature and the feeling that something was outside of the tent. Their dog started growling, and when sent outside, ran off. They could not see what had caused the dog to behave in this way.
