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' - The Guardian'Fascinating . * 'Never have the joys of exploring the churches and cathedrals of this country been so vividly conveyed as they are in this engaging and elegiac book. Here at Beyond Retro we want you to get the most out of your vintage clothes. Their steeples remain landmarks in our towns, villages and cities, even as their influence and authority has waned. Praise for Peter Ross 'Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. Format: Paperback / softbackLength: 432 pagesPublication date: 01 February 2024Publisher: Headline Publishing Group Around Britain by Church. 71 Balham High Road, Balham, SW12 9AP Never have the joys of exploring the churches and cathedrals of this country been so vividly conveyed as they are in this engaging and elegiac book. Steeple Chasing, though it sometimes strikes an elegiac note, is a song of praise.
Reviews
Alan Coady
I treasure a signed and dedicated copy, purchased at Steeple Chasing’s Edinburgh launch on 11 May 2023. The book is also layered in history - many of the featured churches being built on the sites of much older and long vanished structures. Central to the book, which began its life during Covid, is the tension between writing about churches in a time of non-congregation. Churches are about people: the married and the buried; the clergy and the parishioners; the visitors and their guides and those who maintain the fabric of the buildings.
Without them, where can we find the silence necessary to hear the still, small voice which might afford some perspective in today’s noisy and divisive world? Happily, this changed at Ross’s pilgrimage continued. I came to Ross’s writing first through ‘Daunderlust’ (2014) and then ‘A Tomb with a View’ (2021) and so was already a fan. Rather than simply detail who and what was encountered in one church after another, which might soon become as tiring as all lists, the book is organised into themes, such as ‘Dust’ where a mixture of dilapidation and devotion describe churches which have fallen into disrepair, and some which have lovingly been restored.
The prose in Steeple Chasing is as exquisite as in its predecessors; Ross has the wining combination of a journalist’s concision and a poet’s ear. Don’t be fooled by the lack of ‘verified purchase’.
But the book is about so much more than buildings. The former allows him to enfold a wealth of information in easy-to-read sentences which bear you along gently in the writing’s flow; the latter allows him eloquently to address such features as celebration, loss, love, death, fear, hope, solitude, community. If, like me, you are not religious, and wonder why you’d want to turn to a book like Steeple Chasing, then it might be worth considering this: like libraries, the number of churches in the country is diminishing. There are few people better than Ross at letting people tell their own story.
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