On a recent visit to Ushaw College in County Durham, I saw an extraordinary building dedicated to an obscure sport at which a long-dead poet once excelled. Ushaw’s mighty Bounds Wall houses three vast handball courts and six smaller courts entered through pointed arches, like those of a cloister. It is a place redolent of the fantasies of Gothic England etched by Frederick Griggs in the early 20th century. Envisaged as both a school and a seminary, Ushaw College has its roots in the continental colleges founded when Catholicism was outlawed in England. The large courts are for a wallball game similar to fives or Irish handball, but played by teams of four. It seems likely that the four-a-side handball game played there (and in the gigantic neoclassical courts at Prior Park in Bath) was once common to several Catholic schools and had its origins in those years of exile.

The handball-playing poet was Francis Thompson (1859–1907), who attended Ushaw from the age of eleven. Thompson’s life after school was mostly a sad one: for eight years, from 1877 to 1885, he drifted in Manchester, failing to apply himself to his medical studies; then he fell into a life of destitution and addiction in London, from which he was rescued by the writers and editors Wilfrid and Alice Meynell. A minor mystery attends his Manchester years. There are strange near-echoes of the (then unpublished) Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writings in Thompson’s verse – archaic English words and metre not unlike sprung rhythm: ‘Like a flame-plumed fan shake slowly out’; ‘cloud-barred over thee the West’. While Thompson was in Manchester, Hopkins was intermittently associated with the Church of the Holy Name, near the college where Thompson was failing to study medicine. It is a mystery whether the convergences in the verse of these two Catholic poets in Victorian Lancashire are due to coincidence or to contact.

Thompson was not just a keen handball player. He was a distinguished all-round sportsman, as well as the author of one of the best pieces of verse about sport in English: ‘At Lord’s’. The poem is an elegy for the Lancashire cricketers of his drifting youth, the years when he