Finding a new use for the former St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross is not a high priority for the village, according to one local councillor.

Richard Trail said it was “unfortunate” to hear the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland say it was finding it impossible to sell the A-listed modernist ruin to the north of Cardross.

A spokesman for the church described the former seminary at the weekend as “an albatross around its neck” and said it was proving impossible to sell, demolish or even give away the building.

Plans to turn the seminary into a cultural centre collapsed last year when NVA, the arts organisation overseeing the project, went into liquidation, and no further plans have been announced since then.

Councillor Trail, who represents the Helensburgh and Lomond South ward on Argyll and Bute Council, echoed the Church’s view that public funding was likely to be required to do something with the property.

He said: “It has been a liability on their books for many years and various proposals have been put forward for doing something on the site.

“But none of these have come to a successful conclusion and it is unfortunate that it is being described in this way.

“It would be very desirable for something useful to be done with the site. I can’t say it would be a high priority for Cardross but it would certainly be nice to see it being brought into use.

“It depends on whether any other organisations come forward to do something with it, and that probably means the national government will need to support it like they did with NVA.”

The seminary, surrounded by acres of woodland, was opened in 1966 after being designed for the Archdiocese of Glasgow.

The building’s design was considered a masterpiece of modernist, brutalist architecture, but it soon ran into maintenance problems –  and amid a decline in the number of men training for the priesthood, and a change by the Catholic Church in the way it approached the training of new priests, the facility closed its doors in 1980.

Part of the building was subsequently used, along with the adjacent Kilmahew House, as a drug rehabilitation centre, but this, too, closed in the mid-1980s, and Kilmahew House itself was demolished in 1995 because of fire damage.

The former seminary, designed by innovative architects Isi Metzstein and Andrew MacMillan of Glasgow architecture firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, was hailed as one of the finest modern buildings of its era, and was given the prestigious RIBA Architecture award in 1967.

The building was given Category A listed status by Historic Scotland in 1992, and NVA hosted a much-admired sound and light display, Hinterland, in and around the building in the spring of 2016, but plans to transform the site into a new arts and cultural venue fell to pieces last year when NVA announced it was to wind up its operations.

Following NVA’s collapse the Scottish Government announced a review into the future of the building, the results of which are expected later this year.

An expert has recently described the seminary as being as important to Scotland in architectural terms as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: “We would literally give it away for nothing but we can’t find anyone to take it off our hands.

“The archdiocese recognises that it has the responsibility to maintain the estate, to keep it secure and provide the proper insurance cover, but as you can imagine it is a huge albatross around our neck.

“We are literally stuck. It is an impossible position. We can’t sell it, we can’t give it away, we can’t demolish it. We are in a Catch-22 situation.

“If someone were to go today through the forest and try to find this A-listed masterpiece they would probably be shocked because it looks to an average person, who does not have a lot of architectural background, a bit like a concrete car park that has fallen into ruin.”

The property is located in ‘green belt’ land on the northern edge of Cardross, but is designated for planning purposes by the council as part of an ‘area for action’ which could potentially be suitable for leisure or recreational use.