Clare complained of feeling slightly out of sorts a few days before she left, but thankfully was much better by the time she was due to return to Cardiff. Now I know what she meant, as I had a the kind of headache I associate with someing poisonous in my system, and it took me ages to feel fully awake yesterday, even though I was out of the house early enough to say morning prayer with Jim at eight thirty. I arrived without specs, however, which made reading impossible, so I had to leave the reading to Jim, and then slip back to the apartment to collect a pair before celebrating the midweek Eucharist. After the coffee morning, and a spell in the office, I did minimal food shopping and spent the rest of the day indoors keeping warm.
This morning I felt better enough to stick with the plan to drive up to Coin and just beyond on the A-366 road to Ronda to visit Martin and Angela Tomlins at their retreat house of hospitality, ´Cortijo Carranque´ in the rio Grande Valley before you get to the village of Alozaina. It has all the peaks of the Sierras de las Nieves as a dramatic backdrop beyond the immediate hills in the valley. Its the building in the foreground with the white tower, which used to be a dovecote.
The Camino Rural road must be an old road. It´s certainly the one that gives access to many of the small neighbouring farms. Cortijo is the Spanish word for a substantial farmhouse, one that'd be defendable, I learned from Martin, whose labour of love the adaptation of this building has been over the past seven years. The farm with its citrous orchards and nut trees is on 17th century maps of the area, but examination of low courses of brickwork and other features suggest a building was on this low promontory over the river in Moorish times, so it could go back to the fourteenth century if not earlier.
The entrance to the main house retained its traditional courtyard. Martin's adaptation design uses an adjacent yard to re-create in outbuilding space five guestrooms.
Another yard the other side of the house is converted into a cloister-like space - a shaded open air social area, leading off the internal dining room.
There are two more self contained cottages attached to the end wall of the main building. Internally there's a modern kitchen, dining room and the little chapel they've created next together all in a line. I really like that kind of arrangement. It has both a theological and architectural integrity to it.
Angela cooked a marvellous paella for lunch, followed by cheeses and fruit. We sat outside and chatted before and after the meal, then went for walks with the dogs - one down to inspect the rio Grande, fast flowing and stocked with fish. In the rainy season a three metre stream can rise by two metres in a day and spread ten times its width carrying all before it when in spate.
After tea we took another walk up the hillside to a distant cross, set in the landscape apparent by a Scandinavian doctor some forty years earlier who had plans of establishing a healing centre on land below it. His dream never materialised, but the cross remains. Martin and Angela's vision of making a place where exhausted ministers and others could find a retreat and recuperate has come to realisation, and is gradually becoming known. You can find out more on their website here, and my other photos are here.
It was a lovely refreshing afternoon, and we parted with the beginnings of a plan for a Chaplaincy day of reflection to prepare for Passiontide and all this means here in a context where there´s so much liturgical theatre on the streets of every community. I'll enjoy preparing for this over the next two months.
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