From January 2020 to November 2025..The Story 

10.30am on a quiet Sunday morning, January 19th 2020.  Cloudless blue sky and sharp frost.  Telephone rang – my cousin who lives over the road.  “Have you seen the Church lately?”  I glanced out of the window desultorily  and suddenly focused, startled.  The Church was there but the tower – a local landmark for 150 years was nowhere to be seen. 

Within the hour we had 3 fire engines, villagers milling around in the lane, multitudes of men in hard hats and hi viz jackets, police with sniffer dogs (searching for bodies in the rubble!), the Vicar and, by the following day: councillors, journalists, structural engineers and stone masons.  Because the ELDC lost no time in slapping a “Section 78” on us – making it our responsibility to ensure the safety of the building.  In monetary terms this worked out eventually at £32,000, payable within the month, although of course we had no idea of that initially.

Because of the drama, we were given extremely good media coverage, both locally and wider afield.  The Daily Telegraph published a fascinating shot taken from the air.  All of this and the generosity of mainly local people, helped us to raise £12,000.  Villagers raised loans of £16,000 most of which has still to be paid back.  Somehow the funds were raised to pay for a quantity of scaffolding both inside as well as outside the church along with corrugated hoardings which formed a security compound around the site.  And we sat back to take a breath and think – what now?!

What actually happened next was lockdown.  We didn't see the architect until September.  Although we looked into funding and grants available nothing really got going until in 2021 Charles Patrick – our wonderful Vicar, suggested in his modest way, that he introduce us to his brother … who it transpired was just starting a business as a project manager, having worked with Lincoln Cathedral organising grants of millions of pounds.  We would be the first clients of the new Consultancy.

From then on it started happening.  The consultants – Irving/Patrick – held a meeting with a large percentage of the villagers in the churchyard to brainstorm - seeing the broken Church as a clear space – what could we envision happening within it?  To what new uses could we put it?  It represented our only community space and was thus crucial to the heart of the village.

Many suggestions were put forward – from a space to hold craft workshops to children's groups as well as film suppers, concerts and of course worship.  There could even be a possibility of hiring out the space.  John Patrick and his associate: Anne Irving, then worked with us to put in an application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  Much to our joyous amazement we were awarded £225,000 early in 2022.  We thought this massive amount of money would generously cover what we needed to do and certainly without it, we could never have even started.

We were assigned a mentor from the NLHF.  Unfortunately she underestimated the amount of work needed in order to take the first step – the removal of the serious pile of rubble.  She did not want the Project Managers involved for what she saw as the simple first step, feeling that we should be capable of achieving this with the help of the Diocese and our original Architect.  We were hopelessly at sea and hit the dust 6 months later when it transpired we had not got the necessary permissions due to misinformation and misunderstandings.  At that point we demanded our Project Managers be reinstated and were assigned a different mentor – Joe Moran, along with Quantity Surveyor Andrew Purcell, whose professional experience has kept our objectives in focus and progress evaluated from then on.

Even with all this support it still took another year before the rubble removal took place in August 2023.  Professional management understood that this “first step” was to thoroughly comprehend the fragile environment of the churchyard as well as the materials used in building the tower so that a picture could be built up as to why the tower collapsed.  Structural Engineers were employed to complete “boreholes” to measure and assess the geology underneath the church – whether voids could have contributed to imbalance and weakness of the tower.  Archaeologists surveyed the site. There were constant inspections of scaffolding, wild life monitoring including bats and miner bees and conservation experts to inspect and sort the rubble when it was finally moved.  All these professionals had to be engaged through job advertisements, job specifications, tenders and contracts along with sorting the necessary faculties and planning applications.  It was eventually established that the collapse was due mainly to the poor building materials used in the tower.

Having given all this into the capable hands of Anne and John, what was the job of the village?  A village is made up of different people with diverse skills:  Mick Gill and Jeff Jones used their business skills to gain two separate grants from the ELDC which gave necessary support to the NLHF funding.  Pearl Davis took on the post of Treasurer.  Rob Tomkinson set up a Just Giving site, designed a website and introduced us to Facebook while David Bell gave us the use of a paddock for summer events along with a large marquee and keeps an eagle eye on the money situation.  These and many others in the village have worked to facilitate a vast range of events that have maintained our high profile, keeping up enthusiasm to hold us in the public eye and giving our community spirit credibility in the eyes of our funders.  Bearing in mind this is a small village with only 60 odd residents all told, it has often added up to a lot of cooking!

During Covid a group of us painted a series of 8' x 4' boards with a timeline of village history that we mounted on the hoardings.  This put a positive slant on the broken aspect of the Church and displayed our faith that we would rise again.  We were successfully interviewed not only for radio but also TV.  In September 2023, amongst other events, we held a poetry Festival on the theme “Collapse and Renewal” which resulted in a whole booklet of local people's poems.  Through 2024 we put on at least 8 events, most of them in the paddock, ending with a tremendous “Music Festival”.  This was followed by the launch of our Village CD composed by Tom Lane commemorating High Toynton Church and village life, at a crowded Ceilidh in Horncastle. Tom, a well known Lincolnshire musician, and his talented group of  friends performed many of the songs to great applause.  In the Spring of 2025 a Day of Thanks for the National Lottery that showcased the skills of the stonemasons, who had by then been on site for nearly 6 months, drew crowds that arrived an hour early and certainly did not leave on time.  The stonemasons in attendance were extremely gratified by the real interest demonstrated.  Crowds came again in mid September when the Annual Music Festival was held in the newly restored Church building.  Everyone agreed that the acoustics and ambience will ensure that this will be a great performance venue in the future.

Research has been done on our history....recounting the fact that we are a Doubly Thankful Village – one of only 16 in the whole of England and Wales, the history of different churches on this site, welfare of the village from 300 years back etc.  Interviews of “Living Memories”  - oral as well as written.  All this along with information on our Wild flower Churchyard has been programmed on to an “I.Point” - a small device like an I Pad, where visitors can bring up different menus to delve into a plethora of information even taking part in games and quizzes.

This whole journey has been not just making good a structure – it has brought into focus what it means to live in a small community – this one in particular.  A society where people meet informally at least twice a week and in the future perhaps more!  A small but dynamic cog reaching out to a wider locality.  The National Lottery Heritage Fund has also generously awarded us subsequent funds to see this project through to the end.  We will never be able to thank them, and our other funders, enough for the opportunity to construct, not just our Church building, but also something full of positive meaning for all our lives.