Canon’s farewell ahead of her fresh challenge

HUNTINGDONSHIRE'S most senior churchwoman is set to leave the district.

The Rev Canon Dr Maggie Guite, Rural Dean of Huntingdon and Vicar of Fenstanton and Hilton, conducts her last Sunday services in the parish this weekend after seven-and-a-half years.

She will become Vicar of St Mark's, Newnham, Cambridge, in September.

She is unlikely to be replaced by a full-time vicar, but the "deanery plan", which sees Fenstanton and Hilton as one of a series of parishes south of the Great Ouse served by a future team ministry, will not be implemented yet.

Instead, the parish's new priest is expected to be part-time.

Canon Guite said she would miss living in a village - particularly the skylarks she had started to notice while walking her dog.

"There's something different about village life that the clergy notice, particularly at funerals," she said.

"You get huge turnouts with people really rallying round. And it's great to be part of the community when you know people about the place and the children in the school."

But it is better that clergy do not stay too long in one place. "You need fresh blood," she said

In her new job she will also have pastoral care of students, mostly from overseas, at Wolfson College.

"Newnham is a very enviable place to live. We shall be near Grantchester Meadows and within walking distance of the city centre," she said.

Canon Guite's first degree was from Girton College, where her husband, the Rev Malcolm Guite, is part-time chaplain.

She followed it with a PhD in theology from Durham before spending three years as a deaconess in the Southwark Diocese.

She spent 21 years in the Diocese of Ely, including five years non-stipendiary work in Hartford when her husband was a member of the Huntingdon Team Ministry, as Vicar of Hartford and Oxmoor.

They have two school-age children, David and Felicity.