We have started! Our first visit to the church, on Saturday 15 September, has uncovered several items of interest. While Mr Brooke, ably assisted by Mrs Brooke, was photographing, Mrs Knight and her helpers searched the churchyard, and your secretary was investigating graffiti on the fabric. We have already located several items of interest, including more mass-dials than ever recorded before, masons marks, as yet unidentified shapes, etc.

The preliminary survey of the churchyard on this first visit was carried out by Mrs Pat Knight, assisted by Mrs Weller and Mrs Hughes. The eighty gravestones in the southern section were numbered, plotted and assessed prior to a detailed scale plan of the churchyard being drawn up to illustrate family groupings and the 40 historical development of the site. The inscription on each stone is being transcribed, along with a photographic record of those stones whose historical value, decoration, style, and shape merit such treatment. Eleven possible 18c headstones and five 19c chest tombs have already been noted in the southern section of the churchyard, although the majority are of late 19c, and 20c date,

The project will continue over the next few months (weather permitting) and as this is an on-going exercise, almost exclusively the work of our Society (assistance is being given by a few members of tho Family History Society) it is hoped to have as much membership participation as possible, both in recording the inscriptions on the gravestones (a monumental task?) under Mrs Knight’s guidance, or the listing of church features – architecture, glass, furnishings, bells, church plate, records, registers, etc., etc. You do not necessarily have to be expert in any of these fields, though anyone with such knowledge will be doubly welcome.

Those willing to assist Mrs Knight with the churchyard inscriptions should contact her, either at meetings or at her new address: ‘Netherfield’, East Street, West Coker (Telephone West Coker 2120), and those able to put in time on the rest of the activities should get in touch with the secretary, Bill Chapman.

The Society is grateful to the Vicar of Tintinhull for permission to carry out the work, and to Mr Alan Hunt of the Department of History and Archaeology the Dorset Institute of Higher Education, Weymouth, for help and advice regarding the survey of the churchyard and recording of inscriptions.

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