Bats and Belfries

At one time, travel books were mostly church tour books. I’m looking now at the description in the 1928 edition of the Ward, Lock travel guide to south Dorset of St Anselm’s chapel, which sits, looking out to sea, on a headland south of Swanage:

The headland is crowned with a chapel, massively constructed and heavily buttressed. It is related that this chapel was erected in 1140 by a sorrowing father who witnessed the drowning off the Head of his daughter and her newly married husband. The architecture is Norman, but the ecclesiastical origin of the building has been much disputed.

The Ward, Lock guide has accompanied me on many Dorset hikes, and the chapel still provides walkers with welcome shelter from the bracing coastal winds, but unsurprisingly the fashion for church travel books has faded. This has not deterred Peter Ross. From isolated island chapels to the countless churches tucked between London’s glass and metal behemoths, his Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church (2023) is a rich and often joyful account of the deeply personal role churches still play in our communities. If there is something out of time about this kind of project, more suited to the world of John Betjeman and T. S. Eliot, both of whom Ross often quotes, his account of visiting churches and meeting those who care for them is intensely up-to-date, accompanied as it is by the background hum of the coronavirus pandemic and the impact lock downs had on churches, regardless of their size or situation. Divided into thirteen chapters, plus a coda in the paperback edition on life in Westminster Abbey, Steeple Chasing charts Ross’s travels up and down the country and the nation’s journey through the pandemic from darkness into light. Many of the chapters take us to the countryside, particularly Wales and East Anglia, where it seems you are never more than a mile from a forgotten church ready to have its door creaked open. Things get busier in chapters like ‘Wen’, where we spend time in the company of London’s Pearly Kings and Queens. These pages are full of life, of lives lived with and through churches. It is a welcome reminder that Britain is not divided by its regional differences but rather is a network of communities with local histories and traditions in which churches play significant roles. Like the best stories of both rural life and bustling cities, death is never far away. After all, as readers of Ross’s previous book A Tomb with a View (2020) well know, wherever there is a church, there are graves. Sometimes, chapters take a gruesome turn. In ‘Bone’, we learn in vivid detail of St Margaret Clitherow’s martyrdom in 1586. ‘The Pearl of York’, Margaret was charged with heresy for hosting a Catholic mass in her house. She was executed by pene forte et dure: crushed under weights while she lay stretched over a sharp stone. Buried in a shallow grave near a dung heap, Margaret’s body was later found not to have decomposed (often the way with saints) and her right hand was spirited away to become a relic, now housed in the Bar Convent, York. At other moments we turn to the Church’s role in historic persecution and oppression. Ross suggests such connotations are folded into the historical significance of church buildings and the ‘beauty and horror and shame and love of Christianity’s cultural dominance’. John Vigar, Ross’s guide in the ‘Fen’ chapter, embodies this complexity: as a boy, he was a devout Christian who corresponded with John Betjeman; he came out as gay in his late twenties and was ostracized by his church, only to rediscover as an adult atheist a love of churches that channelled Betjeman’s insistence on their beauty as buildings. Vigar’s arms are tattooed with stained-glass saints and he has visited around 12,000 British churches so far. In them he has found the very means to reconcile the discrimination he experienced at Christianity’s hand. At the heart of Steeple Chasing is a conviction that Britain’s churches matter: for their material history, their relationship to local communities, and the warmth and charity they can represent. For ardent believers and devout atheists alike, churches can have a strange, magnetic effect, instilling quiet and reverence without our noticing. Ross believes that the experience of being in a church, alone or in the company of others, has a significance not found elsewhere. The argument is timely given Britain’s changing attitudes to faith. Statistically, religion is steadily disappearing. In 2022, for the first time, more people under 40 identified as having ‘no religion’ than being ‘Church of England’. Figures for those attending church ser vices decline every year. Very few of the people we meet in Steeple Chasing are under 50, conveying the feeling that churches and faith belong to years gone by. The book is therefore elegiac at times, and one wonders how many of the churches featured will remain open in the years to come. Ross’s position is clear: ‘If we all benefit from the existence of historic churches, as repositories of historic treasures and cultural memories, then why should the financial load press down solely upon those locals who use them for worship?’ While there is a seemingly natural association between a church and activities involving community, charitable work and volunteering – all of which are in high demand during crises – funding churches is a low priority during a cost-of-living emergency. I would have liked to hear more from Ross on how this problem might be confronted. Do we need campaigns for church funding from the public purse? How can the public be persuaded to fund churches that most of them will never visit? Ross’s book will send many people off to poke around churches they’ve only ever walked or driven past, but I fear this could be too little too late. Some churches in the book have modernized to tackle their changing place in society. In ‘Cats’, we read of Doorkins Magnificat, a local cat who adopted Southwark Cathedral, took over pest control and gained a considerable social media following, prompting a line of merchandise. Doorkins became an attraction, drawing visitors who would otherwise never have stepped into a cathedral. When she died, Southwark held a funeral. Thirty people attended, the limit under pandemic restrictions, and many more watched online. Some critics were disgusted that a service should be held for a cat during a lockdown in which loved ones could not be together, but Ross quotes several mourners who found Doorkins’s death the catalyst that enabled them to grieve for the friends and family they had lost. While Southwark has embraced social media and livestreams its services, other churches remain locked in what feels like a different f low of time, perhaps none more so than the community of monks at Pluscarden Abbey in Morayshire whom we meet in the opening chapter. They are largely isolated, forgoing contemporary comforts. Yet while they take their chosen vocation and the accompanying solitude seriously, it is in the moments when they temporarily let modernity in that Ross witnesses the lighter side of life at Pluscarden. ‘They watch, communally, around three films each year,’ Ross writes. ‘When a monk is celebrating a significant anniversary he is allowed to choose some form of entertainment. Brother Finbar, to mark twenty-five years at Pluscarden, opted to screen The Blues Brothers for his brethren.’ Perhaps there is a thing or two to be learned from this approach. Churches are often very strange places. To qualify as a warden at St Mary’s in Gayton Thorpe, you need to be willing to clean bat urine off medieval tombs. The custodians of St Mary’s revel in their work, maintaining the church and caring for the bat colonies that live there. Pressure on the bats’ natural habitats means that rural churches are ideal places for roosts, predominantly in dark, quiet corners (they do not actually like belfries). Ross wonders whether churches chosen by bats should receive conservation funding. In 2013, Highgate Cemetery was discovered to be home to rare orb weavers, spiders the size of your palm that flourish in the total darkness of the tombs. The churches in Steeple Chasing are living, breathing places where the odd, the sacred and the everyday live hand in hand. They are places embedded in their surroundings, in the landscapes that encircle them. Having read most of this book during a visit to the Norfolk coast, I was delighted to learn that East Anglian churches are particularly suited to bat colonies because they are often built from flint and mortar, due to the lack of more suitable local stone. Pieces of f lint fall off the churches regularly as the mortar degrades, and as a result, they are peppered with holes perfectly suited for bats to come and go. These churches are natural places of sanctuary for creatures that need to get out of the elements and find a quiet corner to rest – something perhaps for us all to remember.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © William Davies 2025