Survey to gather vital information on churches in Wales
The biggest survey in 15 years aims to build a clearer picture of the condition, use and community impact of church buildings.
In Wales, a quarter of historic churches and chapels have closed in the last decade.
Sir Philip Rutnam, chairman of the National Churches Trust, said: "The future of church buildings is the biggest heritage challenge facing the UK.
"The results of this survey will give everyone access to the most up-to-date information about the state of these buildings and how they contribute to public life through the community activities and events they host and run."
It will also gather information about repair and maintenance needs, funding challenges and the role of volunteers.
The Church in Wales has urged participation in the "timely and important" survey.
"Local churches in Wales face significant challenges in caring for vitally important community buildings and this survey will help to highlight the scale and nature of those challenges, but also help point the way to sustainable solutions," read a statement.
"The survey results will provide evidence when seeking new partners and support for this vital work."
The Presbyterian Church of Wales also backed the survey, describing it as "essential to fully understand the current situation with places of worship and to plan for their future."
The National Churches Survey has been made possible thanks to the generosity of Ecclesiastical Insurance and Yeomans
Churches, chapels, meeting houses and cathedrals from any Christian denomination in Wales can take part at nationalchurchestrust.org/survey
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Rhyl Journal
2 days ago
- Rhyl Journal
Towyn: St Mary's Church reopens after refurbishment
St Mary's Church was closed for six weeks while a rotten floor was replaced. The project followed two and a half years of investigations and planning, involving collaboration with the Aber-Morfa Mission Area, the Diocese of St Asaph, and provincial support from the Church in Wales. The Reverend Janet Crane, vicar of St Mary's Church, said: "We are delighted to have the church open and fully operational once again. "It's been a long process finding a solution to the rotting floor and ensuring we had funding in place to carry out the work. "It was a real team effort. "Now we can concentrate on ensuring the church is open and welcoming to everyone. "We held our Summer Fayre last weekend and we look forward to a Teddy Bears Picnic on August 12." Sunday services have now resumed in the main church building after being temporarily relocated to the vestry. Last month, the church held its first Pet Service in more than 20 years, welcoming five dogs, one cat, a hamster, and a ferret. Rev Crane said: "The most troublesome was the hamster who insisted on kicking the sawdust out of its cage, all over our nice new floor. "It was easily cleaned up though and we were delighted to welcome the local community back into church." READ MORE: Rhyl fitness club ladies raise more than £1,600 for Cancer Research UK As part of its outreach, St Mary's Church offers essential hygiene products every Friday through a scheme launched during the pandemic in 2020. Plans are also underway to open a community pantry to help address food insecurity in the area. St Mary's is part of the Aber-Morfa Mission Area, which includes churches in Rhyl, Rhuddlan, and Bodelwyddan. The Mission Area is one of 20 within the Diocese of St Asaph, which is one of six dioceses in the Church in Wales.
.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1200%26auto%3Dwebp%26quality%3D75%26trim%3D55%2C0%2C56%2C0%26crop%3D&w=3840&q=100)
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Scotsman
Search for Viking life - and boat burial - on tiny Nave Island off Islay
The excavation could be a breathrough in the understanding of the Viking presence on Islay. Sign up to our History and Heritage newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A search for the first Viking house or possible boat burial on Islay is to get under way. Archaeologists will move on to tiny Nave Island, which sits just at the mouth of Loch Gruinart, following the findings of an earlier investigation in 2022. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Nave Island spans just 43 hectares and sits on the western 'sea road' of Britain but, despite the high volume of place names on Islay which are derived from Norse, no evidence of Viking-era dwellings or classic boat burials have yet been found. READ MORE: Travels routes of Vikings across Scotland to be mapped like never before Now a team from Reading University are to return to Nave Island after preliminary investigtions suggested that a piece of land close to a Christian site, which had its roots in a 6th Century monastic complex, could have been a place of importance for Viking settlers. The site of interest - which commands 'spectacular views' over the narrow stretch of sea to the Islay mainland - is a stone and earth structure around 20m in length with rounded ends and curved or bowed sides. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A report from archaeologists who investigated the site said: 'This research has established that the earthwork has similarities with Viking or late Norse domestic structures recorded from the Western and Northern Isles, but can also be compared to Viking funerary monuments, in particular boat burials from the Irish Sea Zone. 'The recent survey work has, therefore, opened new lines of inquiry thatcould be pursued to advance understanding of not only this monument, but also medieval exploitation of the wider Islay landscape.' READ MORE: Incredible journey of star item in the Galloway Hoard revealed for the first time While Viking houses or boat burials - usually associated with high-status figures - have not yet been found on Islay , the archaeological record shows at least seven Viking graves and a coin hoard are known. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Scandinavian artefacts found near Ballinbay on Islay indicate a Viking cemetery, with further mid to high status burials discovered near Bridgend. A late 10th Century hoard unearthed on Machrie farm included more than 90 coins, including examples minted by the English king Aethelstan and the Viking kings of York, as well as some silver ignots. Professor Steve Mithen, from Reading University, and his team now seek to expand understanding of the Viking presence on Islay after Historic Environment Scotland approved an excavation of the site. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad While there are no written accounts of Viking activity on Islay, raids on nearby Rathlin Island and Iona illustrate that Norse warlords were operating in the area as early as 785AD. While now uninhabited and owned by Islay Estates, the last recorded residents of Nave Island were kelp burners who built their oven and chimney within the chapel ruins, the report from the investigation team said. Traces of earlier farm settlements dating from the medieval period were also found. Traces of Viking boat burials in Scotland are relatively rare, with only around 10 such sites found in Scotland to date. They range from the Ardnamurchan boat burial on the mainland, where a a high-ranking warrior was found with his weapons to the Scar boat burial in Orkney, where a woman, man, and child were buried together. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Spectator
7 days ago
- Spectator
The masterpieces of Sussex's radical Christian commune
Ditchling in East Sussex is a small, picturesque village with all the trappings: medieval church, half-timbered house, tea shops, a common, intrusive new housing developments down the road, a good walk from the nearest train station and the Downs on its doorstep. But the resonance of the place owes much to the remarkable artistic activity that has bloomed since Eric Gill moved his family there in 1907. It was part craft commune, part lay monastery, a living experiment in distributism, the radical Christian political philosophy that held that land should be distributed as widely as possible. It was an attempt to resurrect the medieval guild. Gill's Catholic community even had its own: that of St Joseph and St Dominic, which held that 'all work is ordained to God and should be Divine worship' and 'making the goodness of the thing to be made the immediate concern in work'. Dominican friars were frequent visitors. In the early 1920s, Gill's distributist experiment was something of a tourist attraction, with a succession of visitors dropping by to observe this community of craftsmen (Gill repudiated the effete term 'artist'), with its woodworking, stonecutting, silverwork and printing. (Hilary Pepler ran St Dominic's Press, and Edward Johnston – the one member of the group who declined to convert to Catholicism – was their lettering man.) David Jones, painter and poet, was introduced to Ditchling by Mgr John O'Connor – G.K. Chesterton's original Father Brown – and was, for a time, engaged to Gill's daughter Petra. The women did the domestic chores and some skilled work such as weaving. Jones would much later say that 'if I were to write down a typical day at Ditchling in 1922, it would be very hard indeed to convey the naturalness, unaffectedness, happiness, sincerity, rightness, freshness which we at the time felt and that in spite of the usual tensions, strains, squabbles, etc. But just to give an account of it now would seem affected, arty-crafty, self-consciously 'religious', eccentric, mistaken if not actually bogus.' In the same letter he reflects on the 'extreme difficulty of conveying to chaps now the particular freshness or springtime… of the… Weltanschauung of the 1920s'. The workshops and chapel of the group were – unforgivably – demolished in 1989, and the houses sold privately (one owner painted over a mural by Jones) but the establishment of the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft was some compensation for the loss. It was reinvigorated in 2013 and, notwithstanding its small size, has held excellent exhibitions of local artists and associates of the Ditchling group, including Edward Johnston and Frank Brangwyn. Now, 40 years on, it presents another reworking to expand the range of artists on show and deal with the problem of Eric Gill – now best known for interfering with his daughters, plus his dog. On the first, there is a striking assembly of portraits on show of individuals associated with Ditchling, extending beyond the Guild, from Mary Gill, Eric's wife, eyes bent on her work, to Amy Sawyer, a flamboyant artist who wrote plays for local performance. There's fine textile work, notably Grace Denman's striking silkscreen prints, and a reimagining of Ethel Mairet's weaving workshop, complete (for the multisensory route is the way to go nowadays) with an olfactory station for smelling her dye plants, including cabbagey woad. Ditchling's tradition lives on: the illustrations here by John Vernon Lord for Aesop's Fables are exquisite and playful. But it's the work of the Guild that remains outstanding and that ethos of 'the goodness of the thing to be made' is evident in every medium, from Dunstan Pruden's exquisite silver work to Joseph Cribb's curvy, sensual carvings in wood and stone to Johnstone's calligraphy. The radical character of distributism is there in Philip Hagreen's funny anti-capitalist wood engravings. In one, the snake in Eden, 'The First Advertiser', is seen coiled around a tree. 'Eat More Fruit,' it demands. But it's David Jones who steals the show without dominating it: his moving 'Our Lady of the Hills' (1921) is the poster image and I loved the engaging, perky 'Agnus Dei' he created for the guild chapel. Wedding dress, made and worn by Petra Gill, c.1930. DITCHLING MUSEUM OF ART + CRAFT Gill, we know, experimented sexually with his two older daughters (the incest with his sister was consensual). There's a curious little room, established on the advice of the Methodist Survivors' Advisory Group, to which entrance by under-16s is discouraged, which aims to represent the achievements and personality of the girls in their own right, including Petra's hand-woven wedding dress (see above). But separating these things from the rest means that lovely pieces – such as Gill's studies of his daughters in admirable clear line and David Jones's affectionate depiction of Petra – are presented as part of a problem. I'd have put the lot out on general display with a panel offering information about his sins. 'The Plait', 1922, by Eric Gill. IMAGE: DITCHLING MUSEUM OF ART + CRAFT COLLECTION Unless you're a local, it's a hike to get to Ditchling. But it's worth it.
