Fundraising for the project is gathering pace. There has recently been a musical evening at the church, which was very well attended and the annual Tractor Run enjoyed lovely weather. The Project Team was also present with a stall at the Newton Family Fun Day to raise awareness of the project.
Sponsor A Slate has had a fantastic start and we are fast approaching the £1,000 mark which will allow us to place another tile on our totaliser. To help us reach this milestone please click here for the sponsor form. The next fundraising event will be the Safari Supper on Saturday 1st August. For those who have never been, various generous people open up their homes for the evening to serve small groups of people a main course before everyone meets back at the Village Hall for pudding. It is always an enjoyable evening, a great way to meet your neighbours and, of course, there is fantastic food. More details here. Do look out for our stall at the Linton on Ouse Family Day – Saturday 25th July 10:30am-2pm at Linton Village Hall.
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If you live locally you will have seen the photographs appearing around the villages showing the poor condition of the church. Walking or driving past the church every day it is easy to assume it will be there forever but sadly this might not be the case. The roofs are no longer watertight, more slates could slip at any time and the leaking roofs have led to devastating internal damage as the stone carvings simply crumble away.
Today we have launched a Sponsor A Slate appeal to help raise enough money to repair the roofs and protect the heritage within for generations to come. Sponsor forms are available here, inside the church or from any PCC member. Please give what you can to support this wonderful building. We will also be holding an Open Day at the church on Saturday 13th June from 10:30am. The monthly Coffee Morning will also be held in the church that day. You can find out about what the project will involve, what we have discovered so far and let us know what else you'd like to see. There will be activities for children and you can try out the first version of our new Family Trail. Please take just 5 minutes to look inside the church - you will soon see why this project is so very necessary. Our thanks again to the Heritage Lottery Fund. Without their support we would never have been able to carry out the investigations to get the project to this stage. Now that the weather is finally warming up we can start carrying out bat surveys. As you can see from the photograph above (taken early one morning from the Tower) the area around the church is fantastic habitat for bats. Whilst we have often seen bats flying around the churchyard we are not aware of any using the church as a roost. In order to be sure we have asked John Drewett of John Drewett Ecology to carry out a number of emergence surveys for us. John and his team will visit the church just before sunset and wait to see if any bats emerge. Because different bats emit calls at different frequencies we should also be able to determine which species are present.
Our volunteers will also be carrying out informal surveys at sunrise and sunset so don't be alarmed if you see people around the churchyard at odd hours over the next few weeks! Our thanks again to the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting our Development Phase so that we can carry out investigations like this. After a delay due to high winds the final roof investigations have now taken place. Slates were temporarily removed from several areas in order to determine the construction and condition of the roofs. As feared there is serious damage to some of the timbers, especially on the North Aisle roof and we are looking at replacing 75% of the stone slates because they are in such poor condition.
The photo above helps illustrate the sheer scale of the project. Visible are the Vestry, Chancel and Organ Chamber roofs, with the large North Nave and Aisle roofs just behind them. Once again Paul Middlemiss of PWM Platforms was on hand to allow high level access. This enabled our collection of experts from John Drewett Ecology, Geoff Neal Roofing and Ferrey and Mennim Architects to reach the necessary parts of the roof. An inspection was also carried out of the East face of the Tower, which requires repointing as part of the project. John Drewett and Emma Herod were there to look for signs of bats (although nothing was found), of course the delay followed by warmer weather meant any bats present would have already woken up from hibernation. Our ecologists will return next month to carry out emergence surveys which will help us find out if any bats use the church during the breeding season. Our thanks go to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) without whom these investigations would never have been possible: Further investigations into the drainage at All Saints, Newton were carried out last week. Unfortunately there are no records of the location of the drains and the swan-neck bends on the gullies prevented the use of GPS to plot the layout. Therefore we used the old-fashioned method of digging down to follow the path of the drains. Another task as part of the investigations was the excavation of trial holes in order to carry out percolation tests. These allowed us to determine the suitability of particular areas for the installation of new soakaways. Andrew Osguthorpe did all the hard work and also did a wonderful job of returning to the churchyard to how it looked before he started. Jamie Holden of Ferrey and Mennim architects was onsite to oversee what was found and Katie Keefe of York Osteoarchaeology carried out a watching brief during the excavations.
Thanks as ever go the the Heritage Lottery Fund for their support of our Development Phase. Our first batch of investigations at All Saints Church, Newton has now taken place and we are awaiting the results. So far we have had a survey of the drains carried out by JetAire, a survey of the stained glass windows by Joe Burton of J W Burton Stained Glass Ltd and an inspection of the condition of the internal timbers and stonework by Andrew Boyce and Jamie Holden, our architects from Ferrey and Mennim. Plans to assess the condition of the Tower stonework were shelved after the wind picked up. We will hope for better weather when the final roof investigations occur at the end of this month. Access for the high level investigations was facilitated by Paul Middlemiss of PWM Platforms using the machine pictured above. This allowed the experts to closely inspect the condition of various parts of the church which until now had only been inspected using binoculars or a camera zoom.
Our thanks go to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) without whom these investigations would never have been possible: The Development Stage is the name given by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the initial planning phase of our project. Our first step was to approach several suitably qualified architects to tender for the work. From these we selected Andrew Boyce of Ferrey and Mennim to work with us on the project.
A major part of the Development Stage is carrying out investigations to determine exactly what work is needed. As part of this we will employ experts to look into the condition of the drainage system, the stonework on the East face of the tower and around the Clerestory windows, the Clerestory glazing and the condition of the roof including the timbers. The repairs are only a part of the project – there is little point in making the building watertight once more if there is nobody to use it. Therefore we are working hard on ways to attract more visitors to the church. We have spent hours looking into the history of the church, checking facts and searching for answers as we update the leaflets available within the church. We are planning activities to encourage both local people and visitors from further afield into the church to see the heritage within. With Beningbrough Hall (National Trust) on our doorstep we hope to attract some of their visitors to explore the connection with Dawnays, Bourchiers and Earles who once owned the Hall. This website is a part of that – a way for people to keep up to date with the project and learn about All Saints Church, even if they aren’t able to visit. |
AuthorAll Saints Roof Repair Project Team. Archives
February 2018
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