Rainhill Hall was built in 1824 by Bartholomew Bretherton. In 1923 it was sold to the Jesuits and became known as Loyola Hall and was used as a spiritual retreat until 2014 when it was put on the open market. For several years its future was uncertain, but in late 2017 it was purchased by the Signature Living Group with the intention of redeveloping it into a Wedding Venue and Spa.
Rainhill Hall is a Grade II listed building which is detailed on the Historic England website.
In 1969, the Jesuits added a Chapel to Loyola Hall together with an accommodation block for those people who attended retreats.
Our Lady of the Highway
The statue by the gates of Rainhill Hall is known as Our Lady of the Highway.
Many people who pass the statue that stands outside the gates of Rainhill (Loyola) Hall may assume that it was placed there by the Jesuits who owned the Hall from 1924 until 2014 and ran it as a religious retreat. However the truth is that it was placed there by RAF and American servicemen from Burtonwood Airbase sometime in the 1950s following a series of accidents on the bend in the road outside the gates.
John Atherton recalled an episode from the 1970s when the statue was stolen during a student ‘rag week’. After several weeks an anonymous ‘tip-off’ resulted in the statue being recovered from a local canal – unfortunately without her nose. Calls to the original sculptor eventually put the matter right so now Our Lady of the Highway comes complete with a ‘nose job’! As can seen from the letter written by Peter Blake (Superior of Loyola Hall) seeking the return of the statue, many similar statues with a variety of names (even for the same statue it seems) were placed in prominent positions both in the UK and America – a sort of Patron Saint of Motorists and Passers-By.
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