RECOMMENDED READ: High Praise

This month, we find out about the fascinating world of "church-crawlers” and the history of British churches

AT SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL in London, you can hear the same bells that Shakespeare paid for to be rung at his brother’s funeral. In the Yorkshire village of North Grimston, 21st-century children are baptised in the same font as those of a thousand years before. “Churches,” writes Peter Ross, “hold within them Britain’s history, national and personal”— not just architectural wonders, but touching and enduring monuments to the countless numbers of ordinary people who’ve had some of the most important moments of their lives there.

Like many “church-crawlers”, Ross is no longer a religious believer himself. Nonetheless, going into an old church always feels to him like “a homecoming”. Or, as he words it elsewhere in the book: “You are entering a building, but really it is entering you.”

In Steeple Chasing, he travels across the UK visiting grand  cathedrals, tiny, neglected chapels and all points in-between. He meets everybody, from experts in the unexpectedly rude church statues (known as Sheela-na-gigs), to monks who’ve taken vows of poverty and celibacy (“I sometimes think it would be quite nice to have a wife,” muses a monk, before adding, “or even a pair of socks”).