The penultimate speaker’s night of the season found us listening to Stan Brotherton as he talked to us about Evesham Abbey, past, present and future. After speculations of an early Romano-British church, Stan talked about the early beginnings of an Anglo Saxon minster, then progressed through the early years of building and improvements under Egwin and a succession of Abbots, to the later grander building of magnificent proportions that it has been suggested, dwarfed the Bell Tower we know so well. In 1540 the results of the Dissolution saw the Abbey’s demise and within a few years it was little more than a foot print in the ground and its bones became part of the buildings of the town and villages that surrounded it.

In the early 18th century Edward Rudge, whose family owned the land, undertook an excavation of much of the site of the Abbey church and Chapter House. Stan then explained the ambitious plans that the Evesham Abbey Trust were hoping to realise to open up much of the site to the public in the form of a garden that reflected the scale and grandeur of the nave and cloisters. Before and after photos around the site indicated the work already in progress to clear the ivy that consumed the walls; colourful stones that had been hidden for decades, show promise of wonderful things to come.

Please join us on Thursday 24 May at the Friends Meeting House in Cowl Street when Paul Harding and Helen Lee will be talking about “Saxons in Worcestershire”

Please drop in on us at: www.valeofeveshamhistory.org. for details of future talks and to contact us!

Carmel Langridge