VOLUNTEERS from The Liskeard Arts Society’s church recording team recently presented reverend Richard Allen of St Marnarch Church, Lanreath, with a Church Record, a leather bound, illustrated book detailing each item in the church and its history.

Church Recorders contribute to the national record of arts and heritage in churches by photographing or drawing items in the process of producing a permanent record of the items churches contain.

As well as the bound copy for St Marnarch Church, other copies of this record are to be given to the diocese and held in the County Record Office, as well as the libraries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Council for the Care of Churches.

Liskeard Arts Society chairman, Ian Tunbridge, said: “Our Church Recorders learn to see things inside a church with new eyes, to appreciate fine art and craft and to discover the fascinating social and community history which these things represent. The Edmund Bryant story of just one good example of this.”

As noted in The Buildings of England: Cornwall, the appearance of St Manrarch’s is described as “wholly Perpendicular (15th century) and specially complete and satisfying.” The church has Norman walls and its oldest historical object is its Norman font with a palmette design around the bowl.

St Manrarch also contains many other treasures including the best early painted rood screen in Cornwall (16th century), wagon roofs with unusual flat bosses and the wooden tomb of Charles Grylls and his wife, Agnes of Court Barton, dated to 1623 and painted like stone.

But it was the complete set of church pews, donated by local Edmund Bryant, that particularly fired the imagination of the St Manrarch Church Recorders and community.

One of the recording team discovered that Bryant had been baptised on March 3, 1853, in St. Manrarch’s and that in the early 1870s he emigrated to South Africa, where he became joint founder of the firm Gibberd and Bryant, a Gentleman’s Clothing company. Edmund later opened a shop in East London, South Africa that still exists under the trading name of Bryant’s.

He was very successful and on his death on November 24, 1928, left his house and an extensive collection of late 18th century and early 19th century British and European paintings to his wife. The house is now known as the Ann Bryant Gallery.

At the end of his life, Bryant also funded a new set of pews in St Manrarch’s and, when told that the original amount offered was insufficient, agreed to top this up to the total of £96.10s needed. Today, nearly a 100 years later, that gift is still mostly in good repair.

The Liskeard Arts Society Church Recording team is now busy at work recording St Mary’s and St Julian’s Church in Maker, while other volunteering projects are also underway. In making the record, they hope to ensure the preservation and appreciation of a rich and important cultural heritage.