Orthodox monastery for sale in the Stiperstones

Lower Gittenshay Cottage is billed by estate agents as 

a charming detached cottage offering excellent potential, set with outbuildings and land providing stunning views, in an idyllic and secluded rural location. 

But if you explore the photos of the property on the website, you may suspect there is more to the place than that. And you'd be right.

I've blogged before about the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert in the Stiperstones, but most of the videos and links I posted no longer work. Today I came across a post about the place on Citydesert, but it dates from 2014.

Still, it is informative. It tells us that the monastery's only occupant was Brother Aidan:

I first met Brother Aidan, who is a Greek Orthodox monk in his early forties, about a year ago on Mount Athos, the remote peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual centre of the Orthodox Church. He had returned to spend Easter at the monastery at which he had done his training, but told me that otherwise he lived alone in a hermitage high up on the Welsh border.

And then the writer travelled to Shropshire to see his hermitage:

His future home was a dilapidated barn that had once housed hay upstairs and cattle in what is now his living-room. But his monastic apprenticeship, in which he took turns in the kitchen and the fields, has made him an accomplished all-round handyman. The former byre is now a snug den, the walls lime-washed in ochre, the floor set with a pebble mosaic. Much of the simple wooden furniture he made himself; the stout front door is fashioned from coffin oak.

But it is the transformation that he has wreaked on a barn next door that sets him apart from any other bachelor buried deep in the countryside. Skirting round the back of what was once a pigsty, I came to a large wooden door. Beyond it was the most breathtaking sight – a small, but gorgeously frescoed, Orthodox chapel. Lined up along the walls like some heavenly football team were icons of a dozen saints, while from the ceiling Christ gazed down. “I like to think of Him as the conductor,” said Brother Aidan, who is one of only a handful of iconographers at work in Britain….

And the post also gives a precise location for the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert:

It is situated in Lower Gittenshay Cottage, an outlier of an abandoned village known as the Paddock, on the eastern flank of the Stiperstones, in the South-west Shropshire hills.