Steeple Chasing - Around Britain by Church

After some lacklustre reading experiences with many recent novels, I felt it was time to explore more non-fiction, and this book has done much to renew my faith - not religious, given its subject matter, I hasten to add - but rather faith in knowing there are still excellent writers out there who are able to capture and retain the reader’s attention with beautiful and heartfelt prose.
 
Researched and written during the Covid epidemic, the author took himself across the UK visiting both well- and little-known religious or spiritual structures and during the course of which he encountered an array of interesting characters and made new discoveries. I’ve visited some of the destinations myself in the past, others I’ve known nothing about, so I was fascinated to learn about the bizarre and hellish medieval frescoes hidden in small parish churches, cathedral cats, colonies of bats, and the garlanded mysterious holy wells of Wales, among others.
 
“I had found comfort in the churches I visited, though not because of their promise of a better world. Why was that?  It was more to do with what they said about those who had built them, tried their best to maintain them and valued these old places, in all their cobwebbed glory, as manuscripts on which is written the unfinished human story. We read about ourselves in churches, I think, as much as we read about God. We sing our own lives.
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Those people I had encountered on my journey seemed to me strong-hearted, not saints or martyrs - ordinary men and women with a tremendous capacity for endurance and love.”
 
An absolute delight to read. There is grace here, optimism and wonder. A book to recommend, savour and treasure.
 
Five stars

 
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