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.
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.
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.”
And yet the upkeep of these precious buildings falls to the congregations alone. “A case could be made”, Ross says, “that the repair and maintenance of such buildings ought to be paid for by the state, rather than . . . the responsibility lying with an ever-smaller congregation to raise funds through grant applications and bake sales and the collection plate.”
But our churches aren’t museums: they are not run by the State, but by the people who use them. Ross describes a museum curator witnessing a 15th-century chalice being handled at the eucharist. Shocked, the curator say: “We would wear gloves.” The churchwarden replies: “We use it every week. It’s a cup.”
Ross’s trip across Britain is a hymn to this priceless and yet operational inheritance of stone, wood, and love.
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).
Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by church
Peter Ross
Headline £22
(978-1-4722-8192-0)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80