CREDIT: Dave Young

Ian Jarman, founder and secretary of the Friends group, says: “We hope this will be the start of a regular annual festival held here in St Leonards which celebrates our Anglo-Saxon heritage in diverse ways, such as through history, literature, music and the arts. We are keen to use Edith’s statue as a meaningful legacy to focus, trigger and inspire awareness, education and appreciation of our heritage today, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of women, like Edith, who have been written out of, or largely ignored by, conventional history.”