Celebrating St Nicholas’ Stories in Montgomery

Members of St Nicholas’ Church in Montgomery have been busy researching, recording and sharing stories of the church through the centuries with support from a 15 Minute Heritage grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund.

The church now has three new bilingual panels telling the stories of Sir Edmund Mortimer and Catrin Glyndwr as well as the Herbert family and their global influence connecting Montgomery to the history of the wider world.

SONY DSC

The church is holding a Drop in Event on Saturday 16 October from 3-6pm to hear the stories and see the work that has been done to interpret the history of the church building. There will be tea and cake as well.

Church members have also made films with local people, collecting their memories of the church and their relationship to the building and its history – the films are now on the church section of the town’s website starring lots of familiar faces from the town.

Montgomery Church in Wales school has been working on the ‘Montgomery Lives’ project led by composer/musician, Ian Morgan-Williams and poet, Pat Edwards. A recording of the song sung by the children, with the words, has be shared on the Montgomery town and church websites.

Ian and Pat worked with the children to share the stories of Catrin Mortimer and Magdalen Herbert, and to think about the roles they and other remarkable women had played in our history. Pat wrote a poem focusing on how we learn from our ancestors, which Ian put to music and the children learned.

The children then worked on a choice of three writing exercises:- a letter from Sir Edmund Mortimer asking Owain Glyndwr for Catrin’s hand in marriage; a poem about the view from Montgomery Castle; a speech to motivate either Glyndwr’s army or Thomas Herbert’s navy before impending battle.

The work will be part of the display in church on Saturday.

St Nicholas’ Church in Montgomery is part of the Pool Mission Area in the Diocese of St Asaph, one of the six dioceses in the Church in Wales, an independent Province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.