| TO SPEND just £40,000 on renewing the church roof would be envied by most PCCs, until one remembers that good reed thatch lasts only about 40 years. St Agnes’s, in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, in Portsmouth diocese, has just been done in time for its 100th anniversary. The small congregation raised much of the money themselves, in the course of a year, with coffee mornings, flower festivals, garden parties, and also by “selling” bunches of thatch at £10 each. Although reed thatch used to come from Norfolk, these days much of it comes from Eastern Europe, the Rector, the Revd Mark Whatson, told me.
Before St Agnes’s was built, people worshipped in a corrugated-iron building that was like an oven in summer and freezing in winter. Then, after the death of the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who lived locally, his son Hallam gave the land for a church for the estate staff and the people of Freshwater Bay. Lady Tennyson suggested the dedication, perhaps after Keats’s poem The Eve of St Agnes. It was dedicated by the Bishop of Winchester on 12 August 1908, and has been rethatched twice since then (in 1962, the cost was £600).
The special centenary service will be on 12 August this year, when the Lord High Sheriff of the Isle of Wight, the broadcaster and gardener Alan Titchmarsh, will be among the guests. |
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