Harvest Festival

Back again to the village church this morning! Last night the Beaminster Gallery Quire gave a concert in candlelight surrounded by fruit and vegetables in the tiny church. They performed music which was sung and played in the West galleries of churches between 1730 and 1860 before organ music took over. A lot of the melodies had been found in local Dorset manuscripts and Thomas Hardy would certainly have heard them. The choir were dressed in the appropriate country costume of those days and the readings of descriptions of the harvest of yesteryear were in a Dorset country accent, but not quite in the dialect! A wonderful evening.

Today was the Harvest Festival service and everyone came together again from the hamlet, including T and K, and the ten grandchildren of one of the farmers performed a reading to the congregation. We then proceeded to the manor house next door for a harvest lunch and get- together. The fruit and veg from the church were then auctioned off and the tins put into the Lord's Larder for the food bank.
And now it has started to rain!