St. Bede is the Patron of our Church in Kington.
Bede was born in 673 on land belonging to the monastery of Monkwearmouth which was a double monastery with the monastery of Jarrow, in the Kingdom of Northumbria. He was received into the monastery at age seven, and at age nine, was moved to Jarrow, which he never left.
He was a holy man and a scholar through and through. At Jarrow, he found a well-stocked library started by St. Benet Biscop and other renowned predecessors. Northumbria at this time, under its saintly King Oswald, was a haven of residual Roman and Christian culture augmented by the Celtic Christianity emanating from Iona. Bede’s most renowned work was his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ which for many centuries became the classic source of English medieval history.
He also wrote on the sciences, the reckoning of time and the lives of the saints. Seven centuries before Chaucer, he is rightly considered the original master of English literature and learning. He died in 735.
St. Bede the Venerable RC Church, Kington.
This parish community is part of the Weobley parish and is in the pastoral care of the Benedictine monks of Belmont Abbey, Hereford. The present Parish Priest is Fr. Simon McGurk of Belmont Abbey.
The present church of St. Bede the Venerable was built in 1891 by Mr. and Mrs. Wycherly, members of the Anglican church, for members of the congregation of St. Mary’s who could no longer make it up the steep hill. It was built as a ‘Mission Room’ but subsequently became redundant and was leased to the Post Office as a store. It is believed that Mass would have been celebrated in Kington during penal times, and a church room was built into a house in the High Street around 1682, but its identity is obscure.
Meanwhile Catholics had acquired a lease for £1 per week on a raised premises at the back of the Castle Hotel, which became known as ‘the Upper Room’. It was suitably appointed inside, but access was difficult. Then in 1988, it became known that the Post Office was seeking to relinquish its lease on the old mission hall. Hearing of this, Fr. Wilfrid Chadwick and the parish of Weobley moved quickly to purchase it at a cost of £12,500, which was paid by the Archdiocese. A temporary reform of the interior was undertaken and in 2002, a larger scale reordering was undertaken under the direction of Fr. Stephen Holdsworth with Mr. Bill Davies, a Parishioner, as the architect.
Essentially that is the church we have today with new gas heating installed and liturgical iron sculptures from our former chapel at Ewyas Harold.