What is Rolling Ridge Study Retreat?
A place for retreat and renewal nestled on the beautiful slopes of the Blue Ridge above the Shenandoah River. Since 1988, our modest, family-style cabin—the Retreat House—has served as a gathering space for communities of faith and other moral concerns to pursue new possibilities for the well-being of the world.
Together, the Retreat House, Meditation Shelter, Art Cottage, and the surrounding forest create the perfect backdrop for the programmed retreats and educational workshops we offer on topics like paths of contemplation and spirituality, meditative arts, ecology, foraging, and our relationship with the natural world. We also have options for individuals or small groups to make use of these spaces for personal retreat.
Rolling Ridge Study Retreat welcomes all who seek to walk gently on the land, mindful of our interdependence with all living beings in this peaceable kingdom and respectful of each other’s age, gender, color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, cultural identity, and all the nuances of diversity that infuse our common humanity.
Community
A community of Partner Groups and individuals supporting RRSR in a host of ways: through friendship, volunteer workdays, board membership, and annual fees. These long-standing friends use the Retreat House many weekends of the year on a regular, rotating schedule.
A residential staff community caring for visitors, the land, and its wild inhabitants as a volunteer labor of love.
Shared Conservancy Lands
Rolling Ridge Conservancy
Our umbrella organization, the Rolling Ridge Conservancy (RRC), protects, preserves, and nurtures the 1600 acres of land surrounding Rolling Ridge Study Retreat. RRC is committed to balancing the needs of the ecosystem and our wild kin with the needs of the people who live, work, and play here so that humans and nature can interact in mutually beneficial ways. To learn more about the Conservancy, please visit:
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Friends Wilderness Center
Friends Wilderness Center A place of peace and sanctuary within the same 1600-acre wilderness preserve, tucked between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River.
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Baltimore Yearly Meeting Camps
Baltimore Yearly Meeting Camps A Quaker summer camp community nurturing the fire at the center, offering camps, programs, and off-season rentals on the shared conservancy land.
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Still Point Mountain Retreat
Still Point Mountain Retreat A sacred space for quiet retreat, nature study, prayer, family renewal, and group engagement, nestled between the Shenandoah River and the Appalachian Trail, immediately adjacent to Rolling Ridge land.
The Story of Rolling Ridge Study Retreat
L-R: Nelson Good, Betty Good-White, Alta Miller, Dabney Miller, Vivian Headings, Verle Headings, Ellen Peachey, & Paul Peachey
During the early 1970s, a Quaker couple from Baltimore, Henry and Mary Cushing Niles, envisioned that the tract of forested mountain land that they assembled from several holdings south of Harpers Ferry, WV, should be turned into a wilderness preserve in which people of the Washington Metropolitan Region could experience healing and nurture of body and spirit. Rolling Ridge Conservancy (RRC) was formed, and Rolling Ridge Study Retreat (RRSR) became one of the organizations by which this vision is being implemented.
Over the course of several decades, a group of founding families and their faith communities (Partner Groups) began to meet and camp on the land regularly. They gradually constructed the buildings, community homes, and gardens that comprise RRSR today. The founding members committed to “provide religious retreat experiences for individuals, families and groups and to educate participants and other interested persons regarding matters of peace and social justice, environmental pollution, and community and spiritual renewal.”