May / June 2019 Restoration Update

As you walk past the Church gate, you may have noticed that the ‘thermometer’ red line has gone up significantly!  This is for two reasons:

1          We have had grants totally £20,000 from the following grant giving charities;  The All Churches Trust, The Erskine Mouton Trust and the Dorset Historic Churches Trust which gets much of its funding from the September ‘Ride & Stride’  Please join in this this year.

2          We have had an extremely generous private but anonymous donation of  £50,000.

However the flip side of this and the bad news is that the Heritage Lottery Fund(HLF) has refused to give us a grant.  Having said that HLF has indicated that a further application can be made taking into account its comments.  This we will do shortly, and should get an answer in early autumn.

We are also approaching two other grant giving charities – the Wolfson Trust and the National Churches Trust.  Again we will not hear the results until later.

We have raised sufficient funds to repair the Tower, which has been carried out during the lockdown period in 2020/21.