The vista from Worth Abbey is so harmonious it could have come straight from a Constable painting. Five hundred acres of ripening corn, grazing sheep pasture and ancient woodland stretch to the horizon. In the gardens, a solitary duck glides around the ornamental pond. On the walk past the boys boarding school established by Benedictine monks in the 1930s, there is the distant ebb and flow of plainsong seeping from the chapel beyond.

Like much about religious life in Britain, this arcadia is deceptive. On closer inspection, the singing is coming not from a medieval hammer-beamed chapel but a brutally modernist circular dome. The adjoining priory building looks as though it has been rooted in the Sussex earth for several centuries, but it has only been there since the Great Storm of 1987 ripped the roof off Worth’s previous monastery while the Benedictine monks were sleeping.