Werneth Grange

Werneth Grange is a house dating to 1871, with early 20th-century additions, originally built in the Gothic style and later used as a convent between 1907 and 2018. The construction is of coursed and squared rusticated rubble with a banded Welsh slate roof.

The original house is two storeys with an attic, and has an asymmetrical plan. Early in the 20th century, it was converted to a convent, with the addition of a chapel and accommodation block behind it, built on the site of earlier stables. This extension now forms the east wing of the house.

The front of the original house has a three-window facade, with a half-hipped gable on the right-hand side. The main entrance is to the left, within a wood-traceried gabled porch with a swept roof. A second doorway is set in the angle with the right-hand gable, accessed through a shallow, two-storeyed projecting porch with a swept conical roof. The ground floor has paired sash windows, and a three-light mullioned and transomed window is above, between these entrances. The advanced gable to the right has a central oriel bow window springing from a corbel to the first floor, with paired lancet windows in the attic above. Two-pane sash windows on the ground floor are separated by a buttress, and have hood-moulds over. A narrow gable to the far right, likely associated with the early 20th-century additions, has a moulded archway to a recessed porch and a timber canted oriel above, with leaded lights. The gable end of the garden front, to the left of the main entrance porch, has an expressed gable end stack with the date in a roundel, and an oriel window wrapped around the angle as a pinnacle with lancet lights and a spirelet.

The garden front is almost symmetrical, with outer gables and bay windows of 3, 2:3:2 lights under leaded roofs, and three-light mullioned and transomed windows above. The central section has a two-light mullioned and transomed window with traceried upper lights. Gable end stacks are present on the garden range, while axial stacks are found on the entrance and rear block.

The chapel projects as the east wing of the house, constructed in an austere Early English style with three lofty bays.

The interior retains original features, including a tiled central stair hall with a Gothic staircase, and stained-glass internal windows and doors. The house was occupied by the Sisters of Mercy as a convent in 1907, at which time the chapel wing was added. The oak fittings of the chapel were relocated from an earlier convent chapel on Cardinal Street, Oldham.