A full coach, beautiful winter sunshine, wonderful views across the Teme Valley and Stories from the Stones inside the churches, what more could we want!

Project Director and the Listening Post celebrate!

Work continues on development of Parish Heritage Walks - Robert Swinton is finally able to complete audio commentary.

August 2007 -   The River Teme bursts its banks yet again -Tenbury Wells is flooded for the 3rd time! Floood water runs down the hillsides destroying footpaths.  Impossible to complete plans for the Parish Heritage Walks.

August 2007  The blue talking boxes were unwrapped and installed into the parish churches of Broadwas, Cotheridge, Martley, Shelsley Walsh, Stockton-0n-Teme and Lindridge.

12th July 2007  Kevin Crossley-Holland, the Grand Master of Arthur's Teme Valley heritage Knights, created Arthur's first Teme Valley Heritage Knights

Student Amy wins the prize!

All the beautiful designes and graphics for the Quests, the Maps and the Audio CDs are Amy's work - we are so grateful for all her work.

Students of graphic design take part in the project as part of their course they had to design the materials fro the Heritage Quests.  The winner would become our graphic designer.

The team at ATS Heritage expands to include editorial and acting expertises.

They took recordings of farming sounds to be used in conjunction with farming stories recorded with Teme Valley farmers.

The children worked to discover more about their local parish in Arthur's time but to qualify as one of Arthur's Teme Valley Heritage Knights they had to time travel back to Arthur's time.  they needed the special tabards to do this.

Broadwas Primary School. Martley Primary School and Lindridge Primary School all participated in the Schools Project - introducing local history and heritage to children.

Each church community and the general public were given the opportunity to comment upon the prototype. Adjustments were made and production started.  Meanwhile the Storytelling Group worked with professional Storyteller Robin Sharples to see how storytelling techniques could be used to tell their local stories.

They visited the History Centre in Worcester and  Worcester Cathedral Library. They read research already published locally- many communities had published local histories in the run up to the millennium - and they talked to older members of the communit, recording their stories..

Mike Howie and Colin Arbon  consult with representatives from  the churches and with members of the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches in Worcester Diocese  to ensure that they fully understand the brief.

Kevin Crossley-Holland author of The Seeing Stones the book selected to help children imagine and engage with the past first met the project team at a Storytelling session in Worcester Cathedral and teachers at the University Of Worcester.

Each pilot church was to research its own story and then brief a professional writer to develop a script for the 'Talking Box' that would be placed in their church.  The idea of a 'talking box was a new one and the consultants had to develop a product  that would be suitable and acceptable for each of the six pilot churches. Every church was invited to send a representative to take part in the preliminary discussions.

A strong sense of place is one of the remarkable features of the Teme Valley.  In the lead up to the millennium nearly every community had some sort of local history project.  Our task was to find out what had already been discovered and to build on that to identifiy the connections between church and community over the centuries.

One cold Mroning in late January a band of 13th century time travellers visited St. Andrew's Church, Stockton to see if there was anything they could still recognised today.

To run the project at all the Management Group needed to attract volunteers and pilot churches - six churches were needed to take part in the pilot.  As they would each receive a talking box they had to guarantee to be open.
An information meeting was held in Broadwas Church in November 2005.