This website is a record of what has been achieved at Shepherds Law, and a call to future achievement.

The Hermitage of St Mary and St Cuthbert is probably unique. It is certainly counter-cultural. 

I have been a Catholic since the 1990s, but began my spiritual journey in the Anglican Society of St Francis, where I was drawn to learn more about the monastic and, ultimately, the eremitical tradition: once a powerful force in Christianity but steadily marginalized by the pressures of modern life.

It was in 1970 that I discovered a ruin on a hilltop in rural Northumberland and, with a vision shared by the then landowner Sir Ralph Carr-Ellison (1925-2014), from 1971 I began to reside there and to repair it with my own hands. From my own resources I funded the construction of a chapel that went on to be Joint Winner of the ACE/RIBA Award for Religious Architecture in 2015.

For fifty years I have lived at Shepherds Law, saying the Daily Office and welcoming visitors and pilgrims. Many people have remarked on the sense of timelessness that surrounds the site, and over the years I was drawn to a perception of affinity with the early and monastic Northumbrian saints and scholars of the age of Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede. 

This sense drew me back in time to the life of the undivided Church before the events of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century; indeed, before the Great Schism between Western and Eastern Churches of 1054.

The two traditions which came to illuminate the Christian life at Shepherds Law have been first that it is contemplative, focused on the adoration of the divine vision; and second that it is ecumenical, divisions between denominations having no place here.

I pray that these commitments will be continued, and increasingly shared, in future ages.

Brother Harold Palmer

March 2024