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St Chad’s Parish Church Poulton-le-Fylde |
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A couple of suggestions from “Wild About Gardens” – a partnership of the Royal Horticultural Society and the Wildlife Trusts www.wildaboutgardens.org Go Peat FreeNext time you need some compost, make sure it’s labelled peat free. These days it works just as well as peat-based stuff – in fact many types of peat-free are easier to re-wet after getting too dry. If you can’t find any peat-free, ask for it. Consumer demand is the single most powerful way to get retailers and manufacturers to change their ways. More than 94 per cent of the UK’s lowland peat bogs have been destroyed or damaged, and a wealth of wildlife along with it. Bogs take thousands of years to form and are home to all sorts of colourful plants, from the signature sphagnum to carnivorous sundew, bladderwort, bog myrtle and cotton grass (which isn’t really a grass at all!). They provide an environment for rare dragonflies, spiders and other invertebrates and a feeding ground for birds such as the golden plover, meadow pipits and skylarks. These days bogs are also of interest because they act as stores of carbon dioxide, and harvesting them releases it into the atmosphere. Go Chemical FreeIf you’ve used chemicals in the past, this might sound like an invitation to every pest for miles around to shred your garden in days. And, if you’re unlucky, that might just happen – at first. But there’s a good reason why. Often, spraying to deal with pests kills the predators too. When you stop the treatment, back come the aphids. Their ladybird and lacewing predators, whose breeding cycle is a lot longer, are much slower to return. So stick with it. Plant and sculpt your garden to have as much variety as possible, and within a few months no one species will be able to get out of control. The more complex and varied your garden is, the more resilient it becomes. In the end you’ll wonder why you ever needed chemicals in the first place. And your garden will, for the first time, literally hum with life. |
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Consider the Lychgate On the moors in West Yorkshire, there are some stones, two placed together, with crosses marked on them. Many people have thought that they were boundary or marker stones, and in so far as they marked the way towards the oldest church in that area, they were, to be more exact, the oldest churchyard.
In ages past bodies were carried by hand, sometimes over long distances, and there were restrictions placed on where they could be laid to allow the bearers to rest. These two stones were ‘resting’ stones.
When a body arrived at the church for burial, it would again be put down while the administrative formalities were carried out, and again the bearers could rest. So a resting stone was placed at the edge or start of the consecrated land around the church. The priest conducting the funeral would meet the cortege here, not originally out of respect, but rather to receive the required legal certificate for burial before he allowed them to enter the church grounds.
Because of rain and wind it was usually sheltered, and benches were built for the bearers. There would also be a cross within the construction to signify the start of holy land. This is what today we call the ‘lych-gate’; lych coming from the anglo-saxon word lich or lic, related to the modern German word leiche, all meaning corpse. Few old lychgates remain today as many were destroyed or damaged after the Reformation, and most of those that survived were constructed of timber and have since decayed.
In the eighteenth century when the use for the resting stones and thus lychgates declined many were removed and replaced with gates, often retaining the shelter as it continued to be a meeting place for the priest to receive funeral parties. |
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YouTube provides new online audience for Church Army Who would ever have dreamed that a 125 year old mission agency would be using the world's most popular video sharing website to share stories of faith in words and action?
YouTube, with an estimated 20 million visitors each month now hosts short stories of Church Army evangelists reaching out to their communities with the gospel through new and exciting fresh expressions of church. The featured videos focus on the work of a skateboarding evangelist, a former Sikh and others working in urban, inner city and rural settings. The Church Army page on YouTube aims to showcase the good work being done by its 300 or so evangelists all over the UK and Ireland. |
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How the economy benefits from church tourism In this holiday month, anyone who begrudges what it costs to maintain Britain’s churches in good repair should be aware of the extent to which church tourism benefits the economy: no less than £300 million a year, according to the Church Heritage Forum.
Cathedrals and historic churches are a quintessential feature of our landscape and are part of the historic narrative of our national identity, which has a strong appeal for domestic and foreign visitors alike,” the Forum told a Government committee’s inquiry into tourism. The potential for even greater development is not always recognised and, as a result, is not supported and resourced to the degree that it deserves.
The current interest in genealogy and the tracing of ancestry, in which churches play a key role, is an area that could be promoted during the Olympics in 2012, the Forum suggests. This would help to spread the benefits of Olympics tourism across the country. Local initiatives, such as in North Yorkshire, have shown that encouraging church tourism by providing training and resources to local churches can increase visitor numbers by as much as 120 per cent. They have also shown that opening up more churches brings real benefits to community cohesion and encourages churches to provide other community activities.
Church buildings and cathedrals are consistently in the list of most-visited tourist attractions. Five World Heritage sites in the UK specifically include church buildings: Bath Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, Fountains Abbey and Westminster Abbey. An independent survey found that visitors to cathedrals generated £91 million for their local cities in terms of direct spend by visitors. The benefits to local economies of visitors to parish churches are more difficult to quantify, as they do not charge for entry and most are not stewarded, but various surveys suggest that 35-50 million visits a year would be a realistic estimate. The Diocesan Tourism Officer for the Diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich is Margaret Blackall The Churches Tourism Association has a website: www.churchestourismassociation.info |
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Did you know that you were over the hill?
If you are 58 or more, it seems that others may think that you are. A new survey has found that most of us consider ‘youth’ to be over by 35, and ‘old age’ to have begun at 58. This may come as a surprise to many people who are more than 58, but who do not feel quite in the twilight of life just yet! After all, older people are living more active lives than ever before. The survey was done by the Economic and Social Research Council in London. However old you are, here is an encouraging promise, found in Isaiah 46:3,4 : “I have upheld you since you were conceived, and carried you since your birth. Even to your old age and grey hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” So no matter when you ‘go over the hill’, God knows all about it, and is there to help you, if you call on him. Why fresh-air is the best place to stay fit Gyms may have great equipment, but the great outdoors is free, and the negative ions in fresh air generate increased alertness and elevate your mood. Also, outdoor exercise burns more calories than equivalent exercise in a gym, especially when it is a bit cold: the body can use up to 50 per cent more calories just to keep warm. Think about it: jogging around a park – with all the changes in incline, stride length, and the various twists and turns you’ll make because of the uneven terrain – will tone up a greater number of muscle groups than a running machine will. Painting the Church There was a Scottish painter named Smokey Macgregor who was very interested in making a penny where he could, so he often thinned down his paint to make it go a wee bit further.
As it happened, he got away with this for some time, but eventually the BaptistChurch decided to do a big restoration job on the outside of one of their biggest buildings..
Smokey put in a bid, and, because his price was so low, he got the job. So he set about erecting the scaffolding and setting up the planks, and buying the paint and, yes, I am sorry to say, thinning it down with turpentine.. Well, Smokey was up on the scaffolding, painting away, the job nearly completed, when suddenly there was a horrendous clap of thunder, the sky opened, and the rain poured down washing the thinned paint from all over the church and knocking Smokey clear off the scaffold to land on the lawn among the gravestones, surrounded by telltale puddles of the thinned and useless paint. Smokey was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he got down on his knees and cried: "Oh, God, Oh God, forgive me; what should I do?" And from the thunder, a mighty voice spoke.. Repaint! Repaint!And thin no more!! Inner Peace If you can start the day without caffeine, If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it, If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, If you can take criticism and blame without resentment , If you can conquer tension without medical help, If you can relax without liquor, If you can sleep without the aid of drugs, .....then you are probably the family dog. |
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