June 29th 2018

Thanks to everyone who came along earlier this month to hear and talk about the heritage that we have right here in Garvald. It was a great turnout – special thanks to those who helped out – especially on the tech front and for the delicious baking.

For those who couldn’t make it, we’d like to take the opportunity to give a brief summary about the evening. It came about because the church is in need of some repair work and a small group (Dave Neillans, Caroline McGregor, Stephanie Leith, Phillip White, Jo Robertson) has been looking at the scope of repair work and funding options. Funders generally like to see community benefit so we are interested to hear about any ideas for increasing use of the church, alongside the regular worship.

At the meeting we presented the idea of the church accommodating a small exhibition about the history of the village. We had become aware of a project involving recording people’s memories of East Lothian, which is being run by Edinburgh University. Recordings gathered in this way could form part of the exhibition, so we went ahead with a pilot interview. We are grateful to Hamish Gibson for agreeing to be our first interviewee – we were able to hear clips from this interview at the meeting. It was great that a number of you expressed interest in this aspect of the project – a great way to capture the many stories about Garvald in living memory.

We also asked everyone who came along to share ideas about use of the church – these included concerts (of various musical genres), information on the graveyard, walks starting and ending at the church, a community exhibition space, weddings, amateur dramatics.

We do not yet know how much the repair work will cost, and have applied for funds for a condition survey to be undertaken. This will give us a target figure for fundraising. We are setting up a Friends Group for the church which will have its own facebook page and contact email. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about the project – the repair work or memories (oral history) aspect – please get in touch via the contact form below: