In search of the late Brother Harold: paying a visit to England’s oldest hermit

It first occurred to me to visit Shepherd’s Law last October, though it beats me why I never thought of it before. Something jogged my mind and I remembered that there was a hermit here, in Northumberland, on a hill not far away, and that I’d been curious about him since I was a child. So I bundled my husband and my small son into the car and took the A697 to Powburn. As we drove, I explained to my son whom we were looking for. 

Brother Harold Palmer must be over 90, I told him, and he’s lived alone, praying on his hill for 50 years. My grandmother knew him, I said. She used to leave cakes for him in a box at the bottom of the road. 

My grandmother, Molly, loved a holy man. She was a great friend of the Society of St Francis (SSF), the Anglican order to which Br Harold then belonged. In the 1960s she helped find a friary for them in Alnmouth, on the Northumbrian coast. Harold was one of the first to live there, but he never settled. He felt the persistent tug of his own particular vocation and by the time I was born it had pulled him right out of the friary, in and out of the good graces of various religious superiors, and into this isolated Northumbrian field. 

We walked up Harold’s hill, my small family and I, in the bright sun and the strong wind, up to what’s been known for centuries as Shepherd’s Law. “There was no shelter here when Br Harold arrived,” I told my son. “Not even a shed! He made everything himself.” At the top we found the hermitage Harold built: cells, a bell tower and an astonishing chapel. You’d call it a skete in the orthodox tradition, just room for one or two contemplatives and the odd visitor.

But this skete was closed. We tried the door to the cells and the chapel door. All locked. My son pulled the bell rope and the wind ran over the long grass. It felt like the place in mourning. What had happened to Harold? The short answer, which I discovered over the next few weeks of emailing and poking about, was that Br Harold was still alive, though frail. He has since died, on the morning of 4 October – the feast of St Francis.

To the end, he went to his hill when he could. I met a group of his excellent friends, and through them I met the man himself and read his memoir on the website those friends made for him.

And I’m not quite sure whether it was the meeting, the memoir or the stillness on the hill, but I’ve also somehow found a complete conviction that Br Harold was the real deal – a witness to the reality of God – and that Shepherd’s Law is a sacred place. “I’m not a genius at prayer,” Harold once told The Oldie. “I’m just a very ordinary person who’s aware of the presence of God.” It’s hard to explain how exhilarating I find that.

It’s become fashionable once again to talk about England as a Christian country, but in a mournful, elegiac “death of the West” kind of way. Paul Kingsnorth wrote a recent essay called “And Did those Feet:  In Search of the English Soul”, in which he discusses Peter Ackroyd’s book The English Soul and calls (without much hope) for a clutch of new spiritual warriors: 21st-century Blakes, Bedes and Bunyans. “You can turn back towards the light again, England,” he says. “There is a narrow path, and it leads you past the beeches to the lych-gate… The churches are still there, but the pews are empty now save for the ghosts. And where are you, England? Where are you?”

Well, England is in Shepherd’s Law and was Br Harold while he lived. It’s in people who never flinch from their calling. Br Harold didn’t waver even when his led him right out of the Anglicanism and into the Catholic Church. “After some months I began to feel strangely uncomfortable,” he writes. “Certainties and familiar landmarks of life became fluid and I felt as though I were in freefall, not sure where I was going to land. Then at one moment I saw as it were that I was in a box with ‘Society of St Francis’ written on the outside, but that I had fallen through the bottom of the box and ended up in the communion of the monastic Saints of Northumbria.” He prayed for the unity of the Church ever since. 

I’m writing this on Holy Island, where St Cuthbert lived and died. Brother Harold dedicated Shepherd’s Law to Our Lady and to St Cuthbert, so I think he’d have approved of that. I hope he’d also have approved of our plan to walk across the sands to Holy Island via the Pilgrim’s Way to raise money to print his memoir and to pray for the unity of the Church and the future of Shepherd’s Law.

Photo: Queen’s Crag, Northumberland – Amy Gatenby

This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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