Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church

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PAINTED on one of the box pews in St Mary’s, Whitby, are the words “For Strangers Only”: a pew reserved for strangers, for visitors. Peter Ross’s book Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by church is dedicated to “strangers”, to visitors. This book, Ross writes, is “for anyone, native or newcomer, believer or sceptic, wearying for a place to rest”. It’s this spirit of welcome which pervades Steeple Chasing. Ross takes us on a post-pandemic road trip, criss-crossing the British Isles, from the Fens to the Farne Islands. There is no progression here, but digression and detour. And that’s the glory of Steeple Chasing. Ross’s trip across Britain is a hymn to this priceless and yet operational inheritance of stone, wood, and love. Linking it tenuously to Picasso’s Guernica, Ross concludes: “it seems both ancient and queer and radical and modernist”. That could apply to Stanley Spencer. In the same chapter, Paint, Ross takes in his vast religious war painting, Resurrection of the Soldiers, at Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire. I love these (sic) leaps of faith throughout Steeple Chasing. Each time I finish reading a Peter Ross book there’s a pattern developing. I Google a film. In the case of A Tomb With A View it was One Million Dollars, Anife Kellehers’s documentary about Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery that’s also an elegy for its legendary tour guide, Shane MacThomais (who committed suicide aged 44, though that’s not mentioned in the film). It’s a remarkable watch.

With many churches facing closure due to falling rolls and falling income, it is clear throughout the book that churches are not just places of worship but play a vital role in communities. This can take many forms such as running a foodbank or soup kitchen, providing a welcoming safe space for anyone who needs it, being the place where addiction support groups, counselling groups, youth organisations, toddlers groups and so much more take place. When the buildings go, what will happen to these vital services? Despite his breathless itinerary, Ross allows each church that he visits to breathe, and to offer up its peculiar story. He is no dispassionate purveyor of curiosities: he cares, and cares deeply, situating each church in its history and in the lives of those who love it. The cumulative effect is at once celebratory and elegiac.Buildings like Old St Paul’s seem to stand outside time in a way that would make perfect sense to quite a number of people Ross interviews. At Durham, the aged guide talks about St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede as though they are both still living; at Lindisfarne, the former curate of the church next to the priory, tells him that as far as she is concerned Saints Aidan and Cuthbert ‘are just as alive as we are, though in a different state’. And although I wouldn’t go quite so far, I do think that knowledge of the past can, by making us aware of the fleetingness of our own lives, can gift us, however briefly, a sense of timelessness. Of all the reasons for taking up the hobby of what John Betjeman called ‘church-crawling’ – which Ross, tongue only slightly in cheek, suggests ought to be as popular as Munro-bagging – this is, I suspect, the one that chimes the loudest with him: that nowhere else do the past and present slip so easily into each other. Steeple Chasing is a beautiful and brilliant book; written with such care and deep, abiding interest in its subject matter as to entrance the enthusiast and amateur alike. I loved it.' - Fergus Butler-Gallie

Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.' - The Guardian

The Church Times Archive

Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.'-The Guardian In my own experience, the one church where past and present dissolve into each other most completely is Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh, of which Holloway was once rector, about which he wrote so compellingly in his memoir Leaving Alexandria. Ross does it full justice too, helped by excellent interviews with both Alison Watt, whose superlative painting Still hangs above the altar in the church’s Warrior’s Chapel, and Holloway himself. Personally, it’s art, not faith that imbues the place with such a deep sense of spirituality: the depth of Watt’s art and Holloway’s own writing, or the story I’ve heard him tell of his predecessor as rector, a double Military Cross winner in the First World War who was known for his compassion towards the poor and vulnerable. Although not quoted in Steeple Chasing, John Betjeman articulated similar thoughts in the poetry he wrote while serving as the press attache to the British High Commissioner in Dublin in 1941-3, especially those poems written while wandering round increasingly dilapidated graveyards in Church of Ireland country parishes. His poem ‘Emily in Ireland’, for example, ends like this:

Fascinating . . . Ross makes a likeably idiosyncratic guide and one finishes the book feeling strangely optimistic about the inevitable.' - The Observer That’s how we are with death these days: increasingly, we’re giving it the cold, secular shoulder. We don’t want religious funerals in churches or chapels (none of my last four were), so the numbers have dropped by 80 per cent in the last decade. Bad news for the clergy and undertakers is good news for supermarkets and off-licences: according to the Co-op – which conducts 100,000 funerals a year – 21 per cent of us feel that the wake is more important than the funeral service. The real value of churches, he maintains, is that they hold the past and present, decay and use, in a rare balance, that their buildings have a poetry and spirituality about them that only intensifies as they come under threat.’ David Robinson finds the beauty of church, art, and community in Peter Ross’s latest travelogue, Steeple Chasing. Perhaps inevitably, there is a warning here. Ross writes movingly of Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, who, in 1969, set up the Friends of Friendless Churches and then the Churches Conservation Trust. Rachel Morley, the current director of the Friends of Friendless Churches, tells Ross: “These buildings transcend time. They are the spiritual investment and the artistic legacy of generations and a community’s greatest expression of itself over centuries.” The buildings themselves are often extraordinary. Most villages have one, towns and cities several, and they remain landmarks even as their authority has waned. We orient ourselves in relation to a steeple glimpsed across fields or at a busy junction, but more than this, churches offer us an idea of ourselves within history.

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The slates slip, the family is extinguished, yet the poem is written in the present tense. The faith of the mausoleum’s builders – and, presumably the accompanying church – still sings out. Maybe the sea of faith is these days just a tideless, emptying pool, but as long as those buildings are there to remind us what it was, our horizons widen retrospectively across centuries, and we can imagine what faith must have felt like even if we no longer feel it ourselves. Peter Ross, I am certain, would completely understand. The Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy is a Team Vicar in the Savernake Team Ministry. He is the author of Tales of a Country Parish (Short Books, 2022). I was particularly interested in the chapter about the angel roofs found in many churches in Norfolk. These carved angels are high up of course and, perhaps because of that, survived much of the destruction during the reformation. I wanted to share a short quotation from this chapter as an example of how evocatively the author writes and how he easily paints a vivid picture with his words.

Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.’– The GuardianI am as far away from a believer in any sort of religion as one can possible be, but I do worship at the alter of church/church yard architecture and the world such buildings inhabit. So this book was the equivalent to the bible for me. It took me from war art of the 1920’s to water ceremonies at Glastonbury via the matriarch of London herself, St Paul’s. Award-winning writer Peter Ross sets out to tell their stories, and through them a story of Britain. Join him as he visits the unassuming Norfolk church which contains a disturbing secret, and London's mighty cathedrals with their histories of fire and love. Meet cats and bats, monks and druids, angels of oak and steel. There’s nothing like a thousand-year-old building to give one perspective. There’s even a comfort in it: through plague and war, life goes on, the walls stand, and infants continue to be baptised in a font in use since around the Norman conquest. That old-church smell is not just damp and dust, but deep time and – ever so faintly – a scent of enduring hope.