In the 1970's the local M.P. (Jeremy Thorpe), in publicising the then appeal for necessary work to the church fabric, described the church as the Westminster Abbey of North Devon. The monuments, all 49 of them, were certainly a major reason for that description and in the late 1980's the PCC decided that the time had come to do some further restoration work and so the Somerset firm of Kellands (Lawrence & Sue) was approached. English Heritage gave us a substantial grant to start the project and we set up a Friends group to help fundraise. The late Mr Jack Scott worked tirelessly as our fundraising co-ordinator and, in the end we raised over £100,000 to complete as much as we could of the work identified in the report.   English Heritage had commissioned (and paid £5,000) for an extensive report, on the state of all the monuments, before we could start on the any restoration and , eventually, although we only managed to complete one of the four stages of restoration, the result work completed by the Kellands was all we had hoped for.

I hope to put some pictures in the gallery, in due course, but there are some very good photos displayed by the monuments in the church taken during the restoration work.

We put a 'time capsule' (newsletter. Cassette recording etc) inside the monument being restored to the right of the altar.