Sincere apologies for the delay in publishing our blog updates!! Apart from some awful weather that has restricted some of our gardening activities, we've been very busy with some exciting new projects. We will provide a quick overview of these below but will create a specific blog for each, with some images to help explain in more detail what we've been up to.
Gardening Activities - Despite the adverse weather in July and some of August, volunteers have been in attendance at the Abbey site (we had to cancel last weekend - 5th August and other dates in July were restricted, all because of bad weather). The summer flowers have started to bloom and volunteers have been working hard to keep the weeds down. We were very grateful to the local Scouts who helped to move some of the stone work into the Cloister area of the Abbey. Unfortunately, the nave area continues to get overgrown very quickly but we were able to remove numerous stone debris bags left over from the archaeological digs and strip back the area, so it was more open and visible. The raised borders were cleared of weeds and Cathy cleared an area in the cloisters to reveal an area that would have been used by the monks to store books, sit and read. We were also very pleased to welcome two new volunteers, Graham and Linda.
Town Council Grant 2023/24 - On Thursday 20th July 2023, our Chair Elaine Cook attended the Town Councils Award evening and was presented with a grant for £526.26 towards the running of our fortnightly gardening events at the Abbey site, continue to provide information through this website and to cover insurance costs for the running of events at the Abbey. We are all very grateful to the Town Council for this continued support.
Pop-Up Museum - In January 2023 we were asked if we would like to consider displaying artefacts from Keynsham Abbey at the Make Space unit, located opposite the entrance to the Keynsham Leisure Centre. The proposal was for this 'Pop-Up Museum' to coincide with the Heritage Open Day activities planned in September and for a separate event in October. Needless to say this was a really exciting opportunity - to display historical items which have been in archives for many years and to show these off to the community of Keynsham was something we were very keen to do. In order to do this, we teamed up with the Keynsham & Saltford Local History Society and Saltford Brass Mill and put forward a full proposal. We were delighted to have been successful in gaining some funding to run this event which is now being planned for 8th, 9th, 10th, 15th, 16th and 17th September and also for 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th October. Planning is in the final stages and we are hoping to release more information soon.
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