Church Crawling. The Secret Lives and Hidden Sources of England’s Churches, Rachel Morley
The English traditionally suffer from cultural cringe and in the 20th century it took two foreign immigrants – George Zarnecki and Nikolaus Pevsner – to point out to us the global significance of our artistic and architectural treasures. Now, in the 21st, it has happened again: a Roman Catholic from Ireland has written a book praising the English parish church to a nation of non-church-going Protestants. Rachel Morley is a conservation architect who now runs the Friends of Friendless Churches, founded in 1957 to preserve closed or decaying church buildings. She is a church crawler, one of the breed that loves to visit any passing church. She has explored churches all over the country, poking into their stonework, their timber frames, their sculptures, stained glass and tombs, and she has collected stories and anecdotes about their often-elusive history. Her book is an account of her discoveries, what delights her and what appals her. The book’s argument is that parish churches, embodying centuries of local history, of commemoration of the dead and celebration of the living, are the roots of our culture. Parish churches reflect our entire history (including political history) over the last 1500 years, they are a shared social asset even among unbelievers, and if we neglect and close them, we shall precipitate cultural disintegration. She urges us to keep them alive, not least by visiting them and appreciating their beauty, quirks and oddities for themselves.
Rachel Morley writes chattily and accessibly. She places her excellent definitions of technical terms in footnotes as they occur, exactly where the reader needs them, obviating the need to search for a glossary. We travel with her to some remote places and share her discoveries, learning along the way about the nature and behaviour of building materials, medieval imagery, occupants of pompous tombs and, more or less, the history of the Church in England. There are occasional surprising omissions: it is disconcerting, for example, to find that an Irish writer, from the land of the Book of Kells, should not mention the Synod of Whitby that in AD663 swept aside the Irish/Northumbrian Christianity established in the north in favour of Rome. But these are mere blips in the power and persuasiveness of her polemic.
This engaging, readable book would make an enjoyable Christmas present to both experienced church crawlers and those who are yet to discover its pleasures.
Church Crawling. The Secret Lives and Hidden Sources of England’s Churches, Rachel Morley, (London: The Bodley Head, September 2026), 416 pages, ISBN 9781847928009, hardback £22, paperback £12.99
