It’s finally arrived, after keeping our success under-wraps for a couple of weeks – today we launched our Project “The Village with a Heritage Nun Could Guess”. It feels like years since we first brought together people to see if it was possible to put forward a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund to celebrate the history and heritage of our village. With the encouragement of Kathryn Boardman of the HLF, our small ideas turned into a wide ranging project to get our teeth into.
The title has attracted lots of questions! How many people know Mary Ward, a foundress and pioneer, lived at Osgodby Hall with her relatives the Babthorpes at the end of the 1500s. Mary went on to found a religious order which today still survives at the Bar Convent in York. Sister Patricia at the convent has been very supportive of our project. She has given us lots of background information, and personally gave us a guided tour of the Mary Ward exhibition. Nuns from all over the world still visit today to see where Mary Ward lived during her time at Osgodby.
We chose the monthly coffee morning held at the Village Institute as the launch-pad. The day got off to a good start at 7 20 pm in the morning, when Shirley (still in her fluffy dressing gown), was interviewed in the comfort of her home, by telephone by Julia Lewis on BBC Radio York. Radio York continued to give us a mention throughout the morning – even on the new headlines. Great publicity for, not only the project, but also the monthly Coffee Morning raising funds for the Village Institute. During the previous weeks we had issued press releases and it was great Radio York ran a feature. The local press had also mentioned our success of securing our £49,500.
Our display was showing initial research which had been undertaken to get us where we are today. It was great to see people interested in finding out about it. We were giving away free cupcakes to people who brought along a used lottery ticket – a crowd pleaser.
It was great to see volunteer members of the group come along and chat with people coming along to the coffee morning.
Brilliant start!