Heartwarming Day
John Wesley was an English Anglican cleric and theologian who, with his brother Charles and fellow cleric George Whitefield, founded Methodism. John Wesley visited Stony Stratford on a number of occasions in the 1770s, preaching beneath a great elm tree in the Market Square.
There is a tradition for Methodists to gather around the tree on the Sunday nearest to Aldersgate for Heartwarming Day, the day when Wesley recorded: ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed.’ The tree had to be felled in 2007 but it was replanted with an oak.