Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross — tales of a church-crawler

Empathy is a delightful quality and it’s one that the gifted Scottish travel-writer Peter Ross shares with that prince of church-crawlers, the poet John Betjeman. Blessed with Betjeman’s gift for striking up friendships with eccentric characters, Ross uses these seemingly random encounters to reveal some of the stories attached to the glorious religious sites brought to life in Steeple Chasing, a book that illuminates the curious, steadfast passion British people feel for the churches that so few of them attend and yet which form such a significant feature of the landscape.

“We’re all oddballs really,” announces one of the monks of Pluscarden Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in northern Scotland where an austere regime of pre-dawn prayers and hours Gregorian chanting a day still allows time for an occasional film show (The Blues Brothers went down well) and home-produced skits based on the younger monks’ memories of watching Monty Python.

At Gloucester Cathedral, built in 1089, the resident stonemason introduces Ross to “the glory of Gloucester”, a gigantic 14th-century window — once the largest in the world — that he describes as “a medieval blockbuster, a wide-screen epic of apostles, bishops, martyrs and saints”.

Then near Swaffham in Norfolk, Ross hears how Bob Davey and his wife rescued a neglected 11th century woodland church, St Mary’s, from a coven of satanists. Restoring it themselves, the couple uncovered a frescoed nave and, incredibly, the only surviving painting in England of Noah’s Ark. Take on a ruined church when you retire, Bob advised visitors. “You’ll never look back.”

Other surprises abound. Touring East Anglia, Ross inspects the roof angels of St Peter’s Upwell, the Fenland church on which Dorothy L Sayers drew for her tantalising 1934 mystery novel of bell-ringers and bigamy, The Nine Tailors. The angels of East Anglia’s soaring church roofs survived mass destruction during the civil wars of the 16th century by order of parliament solely because of their inaccessible height.

Ross moves on to shepherd his readers down into the wealth of London’s churches and cathedrals. At St Paul’s, nicely described by Frances Partridge as “the nose on London’s face”, he learns how easily the dome, a thin skin of lead supported by wooden timbers, could have gone up in flames during the Blitz.

At Southwark Cathedral, Ross attends the funeral of Doorkins Magnificat, the verger’s cat, who when a beloved dean died, took up residence under his coffin in the nave before attending the funeral service. “She knew that he had gone, but that he was there,” explained the verger.

Steeples gain an unexpected perspective when Ross at last meets London’s master steeplejack and learns that to climb a church spire resembles scaling the mast of a ship while it shifts in the wind. “Your stomach drops. You feel the stone sway.”

At St Mary-le-Bow church, in one of the best sections of an engrossing book, Ross gets an education in the difficult art of bell-ringing from Simon Mayer, whose team rings the intricate methods (never melodies) at five of the great London churches. “Imagine trying to control a two-ton weight with a rope,” Meyer tells Ross, before adding that an elite bell-ringer can toll his invisible bell for four hours and never miss a note.

Neither does Ross. His book is a delicious treat, and one that both believers and sceptics will enjoy.

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church by Peter Ross, Headline £22, 400 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café