Marldon Church is busy raising funds for repairs and helping the programme of refurbishment along are the willing members of the Lee Heron Memorial Fund - Lee Heron was a brave young woman, daughter of the restaurateurs of Castle Barton,Compton, who sadly died a premature death due to cancer.
If you can help with ideas for fundraising please contact Tony Moore on 01803 551729
By 2008 Berry Pomeroy Parish will have spent £250,000 on refurbsihing the church in six years - not bad for a small village of 500 people and an average congregation of 28! The next phase is repair of the bells and bell frame costing a cool £45,000 - volunteers urgently needed to raise more funds as church reserves are totally exhausted !
The PCC have raise and spent £200,000 to renew and repair church roof, interior, and tower and we have exhausted our reserves. The bells need £42,000 spent on them if they are ever to ring again. Fortunately one or two people have offered generous donations to give us a £10,000 kick start but that’s till leaves £32,000 to raise.
Why bother you might ask? We could install digital electronic bells for a fraction of the cost and circumstances may yet force us down that route. However to do so would be to say goodbye to centuries of history and tradition.
In Christian Churches bells came into use as early as the year 400, and their introduction is ascribed to Paulinus, bishop of Nola, a town of Campania, in Italy. Their use spread rapidly, as in those unsettled times the church-bell was useful not only for summoning the faithful to religious services, but also for giving an alarm when danger threatened. Very large bells, for church towers, were probably not in common use until the eleventh century.
In the old parish churches of England it is customary to ring the bells in a harmonious peal, in which all are rung at the same time, the volume of sound thus produced being enormous and the effect very beautiful, particularly at a distance. Many of the bells used in churches are engraved with appropriate inscriptions, telling the various uses to which they are put. Some bear the title "Ave Maria," and are used especially for the Angelus; others have an invocation to St. Gabriel, the archangel of the Annunciation.
We have a full written record and diagrams of our own eight bells and recently Mrs Burford of Berry Pomeroy Primary School bravely scaled the bell tower to provide us with detailed photographs of them. I suggested to Hugh Edwards we rename one the bells the Burford Bell(e) in her honour!
We have received plenty of fund-raising ideas from the Central Council of Church Bellringers but we urgently need a group of interested people to put them into action. You can help – either to raise the bells to new life or to let them sleep.
If you want the bells to have a future do please offer your help – the more people to share the work the better – everyone has a skill they can offer whether it is baking scones or sealing envelopes! All offers of financial help gratefully received.
Revd Peter C Bellenes, Vicar
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