A group of villagers from East and West Charleton have come together to save St Mary’s Church.

Reverend Mark Neve, Rector of the Start Bay Mission Community, a group of churches which includes the church in Charleston explained:

“We formed a friends group within the village to help raise funds to maintain the church, but also to find new ways of using the church for the community.

“We had a couple of public meetings last year, the second of those in November, and within a couple of weeks we'd got over 40 people who had signed up to be members of the group and a good number of those have committed to make regular contributions to the funding of the group which means that we on the basis of those we'll be able to raise between four and five thousand pounds a year.

“We're still looking to to spread that out further.

“It's a bigger community than that and we'd like to get as many people involved as possible.”

The church also has strong links to Charleston C of E Primary School as the Reverend Mark says: “I'm in there on a regular basis.

“I go in every week to lead worship and we we have that good relationship.

“The school are keen to get involved in what we're doing here so we're trying to find as many ways as possible to do that.”

There are around 500 parishioners in total, split between West Charleston and East Charleston which is about 200 properties.

The Reverend Mark continues: “We've engaged with about 10 per cent at the moment but we need to go further.

“We have a regular service here once a month because of the way things have happened in the past.

“Trying to be more frequent than that would end up just dragging people away from the other churches that they've now gone to but we have a service on the fourth Sunday of each month in the evening and that's reasonably well attended and then we have special services at Christmas and Easter and also special services for the school.

“The next service is actually on Easter Sunday April 20.

“That will be at five o'clock and then onwards at six throughout spring and summer.”

The Reverend Mark concluded by saying: “I'm really impressed with the level of support that's come from the villagers.

“They are so enthusiastic.

“One of the things that I find in this area in general is there's a real appetite for volunteering and that's noticeable here.

“The gardening group have started to do work in the churchyard and we had a meeting of some of the volunteers here last night.

“Again, the appetite for doing things for the benefit of the community is really encouraging.’

The church of St. Mary is made of stone, mainly in the Decorated style and consists of chancel, nave, transept, north aisle, south porch and an embattled western tower, with turret, formerly containing six.

The pulpit and font are of Caen stone.