‘It’s just a kind of innate thing in some people, to be drawn to that territory,’ says Peter Ross, ‘a sort of architectural and devotional territory.’ The Glasgow-based journalist and author has become something of an authority (perhaps an unexpected one) on the territory he is speaking of: churches and their surrounding spaces. In 2020 he published the non-fiction book A Tomb With A View, which roved through British and Irish graveyards, and went on to win the Saltire Non-Fiction Book Of The Year. Now he’s following it up with a journey around the country’s churches, aptly named Steeple Chasing. 

While Ross has spent a career asking curious questions of unusual subjects, he didn’t grow up in a particularly religious family (he describes his upbringing as ‘nominally Church Of Scotland’). It was a combination of unfinished business started with Tomb, along with the current state of the world, that led him towards churches as places of solace and history. 

‘My general idea about churches is that they’re essentially like a kind of British Museum that’s been broken up and scattered across the whole of the British Isles,’ he says. ‘These are, in many cases, quite unassuming, ill-attended places, and yet they contain these wonders.’ One of those wonders he discovered during his Tomb research was a startling wax effigy of a gentlewoman named Sarah Hare, which has stood in the village church at Stow Bardolph in Norfolk since the 1740s. It became, Ross says, the ‘acorn’ for his new book. ‘In churches that maybe don’t get very many visitors or people don’t think about very much, you can find extraordinary things.’ 

But while this was his starting point, Ross had also by this time begun brooding on deeper matters. ‘I was really looking for a project that would help me escape the present moment, or console me in the present moment. You know, the issues with Trump and Brexit, and a general feeling of disillusionment with politics, and the wider more overarching pessimism about climate emergency. Churches seemed like a way of going back into the deep past and surrounding myself with history and beauty, finding some sort of consolation in that.’

The deep past is a perfect way of summing up the history of those buildings that feature in his book. Ross visits churches which date back almost a thousand years, such as London’s St Bartholemew The Less. He witnesses a baptism in a village church in North Grimston, Yorkshire, using a font carved just after the Norman Conquest. There are wooden angels in the Norfolk churches he visits that may or may not contain the faces of the medieval carpenters who carved them. And then there are the strange, ambiguous stone sheela-na-gig carvings that have populated churches around Britain and Ireland, possibly since pagan times.

The most moving and affecting figures to feature in Steeple Chasing, however, are the people Ross meets on his odyssey. Some of them, such as the Benedictine monks he stays with at Pluscarden Abbey in Moray, have deeply religious connections to the churches they care for. Others, such as ecclesiologist John Vigar who introduces him to Norfolk’s wooden angels, lost their Christian faith but still believe in the church’s awe-inspiring beauty. Ross was keen for the book not to be evangelical in its presentation of Christianity, but he doesn’t approach his subject from a strictly secular perspective either. 

‘I never say in the story what my own beliefs are. I’m careful not to do that, because I don’t think it’s useful for people to know.’ It is important to him that the book can be read by anyone, regardless of faith. ‘It’s definitely not a book in which I’m trying to persuade people to go to church and worship.’ On the other hand, Ross does believe in the power of churches themselves. ‘I’m not saying churches are special because they are the house of god. I’m saying they’re special because, for hundreds of years, people have believed they are the house of god.’ It is a power, says Ross, that reaches into the very stones. ‘What you feel, particularly when you walk into a very old church, is the accumulated ache of centuries of human emotion.’

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain By Church is out now, published by Headline; Peter Ross speaks about the book at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Sunday 21 May, as part of Aye Write.