I am travelling across Connemara in torrential rain as I stop to write this bulletin piece. We welcome our new Bishop into the Diocese next Wednesday. Let us keep Bishop Stephen in our prayers at this challenging time for all of us. As you will have read in last week’s bulletin, I’d like to use the 10th Anniversary of the Durham Martyrs’ Parish as a time to reflect on preparing for the future. We’ve come a long way in 10 years. Thanks to all for working so generously in achieving this. Our schools are now winding down after a very busy and demanding year. Again, I say a big thank you to all our teachers and staff for their great efforts, sometimes in very difficult circumstances. Well done and have that much deserved Summer break. Special thanks and prayers to Fiona Westerman at St. Godric’s, who retires.
Tim Robinson, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom
“ Thinking now of the luminous cleanliness and bell-like resonance of Aran’s limestone rock sheets, their parallel fissures pointing one to the edge of clear-cut cliffs, and the solace on a summer’s day of its spring wells that image the perfection of the wild flowers attendant on them, I realise what a difficult terrain is south Connemara: multidirectional from every point so complex in form it verges on the formless, disputing every step with stony irregularities, leechlike softness of bog or bootlace-catching twiggy heath. Often when visitors ask me what they should see in this region, I am at a loss. A curious hole in the ground? The memory of an old song about a drowning? Ultimately I have to tell them that this is a land without shortcuts.”