Brooke is a small hamlet just south of Oakham, easy to pass without noticing, but it was once home to one of Rutland's few monastic houses. Brooke Priory was founded before 1153 by Hugh de Ferrers, lord of the manor of Oakham, as a modest Augustinian establishment intended to support just three canons. It never prospered: contemporary descriptions call it "for the most ruinous" by the time of its dissolution in 1535 under Henry VIII, and nothing of its buildings survives above ground today beyond earthworks and crop marks, thought to mark fishpools and outbuildings.
The priory's most tangible legacy turned up centuries later and entirely by accident: around 1805, building work in the cellar of Priory House uncovered a thirteenth-century Limoges enamel reliquary that had apparently been hidden on the site, undisturbed, since the priory's dissolution. It is now on permanent display at Rutland County Museum in Oakham, a genuinely remarkable survival for a house this small and poor.
Priory House itself, a later building standing near the original site and possibly reusing some fabric from the monastic buildings, now operates as bed and breakfast accommodation, and it is here, rather than at the ruined priory itself, that a paranormal directory records a haunting: a monk, seen as a silent, hooded figure walking through the gardens, who disappears if anyone approaches. No date, witness name or specific incident is attached to the claim beyond the bare description, and it should be read as a single, undated report rather than an established local tradition, though the site's genuine monastic history gives the story more plausible grounding than most "resident monk" claims attached to old buildings with no real religious history at all.
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