Dilapidated former church building overlooking Hollingworth Lake sells for £147,000 over guide price

A dilapidated former church building overlooking Hollingworth Lake has sold at auction for £147,000 above the guide price.

St Hilda’s Mission Church and its grounds went up for auction with property auctioneer Pugh on 18 October, with a guide price of £25,000.

Attracting interest with over 130 bids, the church sold for £172,000.

A spokesperson for Pugh said: “We pride ourselves on transparent pricing that purposefully sparks buyer interest.

“Usually when we set a property at a guide price of £25,000 we definitely don’t predict a final sale value of over £170,000.

“But we can’t say we’re too surprised, competitive bidding is part and parcel with online auctions, and this is certainly a unique property that buyers were inevitably going to grow attached to (if you’re into that sort of thing).

“We had 20 bidders and 130 bids in total, which was well above our expectations. However, I think that if it wasn’t ‘spooky season’ we might not have seen such high interest. 

“Given all the property’s news coverage leading up to the auction, it's very possible that first-time bidders with an interest in spooky stuff saw the abandoned church and liked the concept of owning their own ‘cabin in the woods’ so much that it bumped the price right up.

“Excitement runs very high on auction days, let alone when there are as many as 20 bidders competing. It makes sense that passionate paranormal fans could create a bidding frenzy big enough to result in this jaw-dropping sale price.

“Back in May 2022, we saw a haunted mill sold for £19,000 over guide price. Whilst that isn’t quite as substantial as the church, it definitely evidences a pattern of buyer demand for spooky stuff.”

Founded in 1931, the church closed in 1998 and has stood derelict ever since. The dilapidated remains have caught the attention of many history enthusiasts and passers-by because of its eerie appearance on the Lancashire landscape.

But the church’s history goes back much further than that. Records at the Touchstones Local Studies Library in Rochdale show that in the 1870s, there were around 250 Roman Catholics in Littleborough, and they were the ones who all banded together to build the church on its initial site Featherstall Road in 1878.

It became known as the ‘Iron Church’ as it was made of metal sheets.

The church building was later bought by the Mission of St Hilda before it was dismantled and rebuilt at Hollingworth Fold in 1931.