Saturday 19th September 2026
Holy Trinity Church, Abbots Leigh
Doors open 2pm, performance at 2:30pm

We are lucky enough to have Bristol Harmony, a West Gallery Quire, visit during their annual Church Crawl on Saturday. They will be playing and singing music that was played and sung in churches in the centuries before organs were installed. This will be a rare opportunity to discover a tradition long lost to current church culture.
Historically, harmony singers and musicians were often placed at the west end of a church, in a raised ‘singing seat’ or a gallery: hence the term ‘West Gallery music’, which was devised by Thomas Hardy to refer to the sturdily independent character of the old church bands.
In the end, as Hardy observed, changes of various kinds in church and village life and practice led to the demise of the singers as an independent force in English country churches: the galleries and singing seats were destroyed, the instruments were disposed of, and the manuscript music books lost. The churches came to be dominated by a harmonium or an organ, and the people sang in regimented fashion from Hymns Ancient & Modern.

Following the Quire's performance, at about 3pm, tea/coffee and refreshments will be served in the Church.

After tea, from about 3:30pm we will be conducting guided tours of our beautiful Churchyard.
We will reveal the lives of some of those who lived in Abbots Leigh and have been buried in the Churchyard since 1699, including MP's, slave owners, inn keepers, butchers, servants, doctors, shepherds, shipwrights, farmers, vicars, lawyers...
Information on some of the memorials within the Church will also be available.

Tours will last approx an hour.
We kindly request you book your place on a tour in advance. Each tour group will be limited in size to 6 people. Please email our administrator, Abi, at [email protected] to book a tour.
Donations are sought @ £10.00 per head, with all proceeds going to support the Church. Children are welcome too, with no donation expected for those under 5.

We look forward to seeing you there!