Christening in St. Mary's

Fifteen months' ago after closing its doors St. Mary's has re-opened with a baptism.

Chris and Michelle Stokes, who were the last couple to get married at St. Mary's in April 2006, were the first to use the re-opened church to have their baby Emily baptised.

The building had been closed for repair work and villagers have been working hard for the last 14 months to raise the money to finance the work.

Around £16,500 has been raised so far but the current repairs are only TEMPORARY and approximately £58,000 STILL NEEDS TO BE RAISED for the church to be eligible for a top-up grant from English Heritage.

Great Wymondley Parochial Church Council would like to thank those who have supported the church and who have made donations or helped with the various fundraising activities.

Open Gardens - Sunday 8th July 2007

This year's Open Gardens was a great success and raised £2025 on Sunday thanks to the great weather!!!.

Well done to everyone for their help and consideration. I know many people stayed helping in the kitchens much longer than they had anticipated and I am not sure how we would have managed without you - many many thanks.

All the visitors were very complimentary about the gardens, the teas and lunches especially the cakes and the variety of people presenting things on the green. This was a very big effort by the whole village. We hopefully will be updating the board on the Green - we can move up another box.

Well done everyone!

Village Fete - 24th June 2007

The fete this year in spite of the bad weather raised an excellent £1,550 towards the Church Restoration Fund.

Well done everyone who helped run it and provided things to sell and things for people to see and do. Thank you very much.

The BBQ after the fete made a profit of £186 even in the rain. This makes the grand total of £1,736. This will move the red up the
scale on the appeal board!

Plant Sale - 26th May 2007

The plant sale with a produce stall raised an impressive £443.65 and the remaining plants were put out each day on The Green for the next week inviting donations from the passers by in exchange for plants. The honesty box collected a further £111.00 making a grand total of £554.65!

Thank you to everyone who grew and provided plants for us to sell, lent greenhouses to bring them on, made cakes etc to sell on the produce stall and helped run the sale on the day.

A special thank you to St. Ippolyts Church who gave us all the remaining plants from their plant sale - a real help.

Please note - we are hoping to run an Autumn Sale with divided plants and potted on seedlings.

Sponsored Walk - 22nd April 2007

Our sponsored walk on 22nd April raised £834. We had a lovely day for the walk which was well attended with many dogs and people of all ages.

We enjoyed home made soup and bread in the Village Hall afterwards. Thank you to Nicky Tomlin for organising the event including researching, plotting out the route, drawing the map and making a lovely big pan of soup.

Maybe we could do this again next year!

Shakespeare Marathon

Mike Cannon raised £247 running the Shakespeare Marathon in 4 hours 46 minutes. Well done Mike!!

Mike was unable to run the 3 Peaks Challenge due to being called into urgent business at work - he was very disappointed and keen to set another date for the challenge later in the year. Those of you who have sponsored Mike for this challenge, we will contact you soon with further details.

Money raised so far!

We have raised over £16,500 so far. We are absolutely thrilled with our initial success and this has spurred us on for the rest of the year.

Many, many THANK YOU'S to everyone who has supported us in every way - donating money, cakes, plants and bric-a-brac. Setting up and running stalls in Hitchin and Great Wymondley and of course all of you who have supported us by buying all our various commodities, sponsoring our athletes and attending our events!

PLEASE PLEASE KEEP IT UP!

Latest Restoration Information

The scaffolding is up! The engineer and architect have been viewing the walls in the cherry picker and marking up every elevation that needs work. So far, broadly, things are as they had anticipated – the parapets will have to come down to the 1st arched window. There are concerns about the buttresses and some excavation will be required in order to investigate further. When a report is available, the building committee will meet and a draft report will be sent to English Heritage. The access audit and the maintenance plans have been completed. Finally, as soon as temporary repair to the roof is done we will be able to reopen the church.

Donation from the NHMD

The North Herts Metal Detecting group have kindly donated £200 following Cherry’s presentation at their meeting. Cherry went on to say that the NHMD group sell off their finds and that we may have another donation from the proceeds of the sale. One of the group will attend our fete and offer people a chance to do some treasure hunting with his metal detector, as well as organising a 2 day treasure hunt under their guidance. Finally they very generously offered to do one of our Autumn lectures.

Barn Dance

The Barn Dance was huge success raising £1180; everyone enjoyed the evening and said they are looking forward to the next one. Cherry went on to say that Mrs. Keech offered her band as a possible option for another Barn Dance in the Autumn.

Hitchin Market

The Hitchin Market raised £285. The St Mary’s Square charity stall was very busy and managed to raise £464. Numerous plants, kindly donated by St Ippolyts parish, where also sold during the day. Jackie reported that they had enjoyed running the stalls and are looking forward to doing more.