Author Peter Ross on searching for consolation around sacred places

It is 10.30am on a bright day in April. The congregation for morning mass has come and gone. Sunlight is streaming through the stained glass windows of the interior and it is immediately apparent we have walked into a jewellery box.

The work of stained glass artist Sadie McLellan, these windows are a breathtaking vision of beauty and suffering. The suffering is in the story they tell. Here are the Stations of the Cross as told in coloured glass. The beauty comes in the delicacy and deliberation that has gone into telling that story. On this clear sunny morning the light streams through the glass and as a result, the white-walled church is a dazzle of blues and reds and yellows.

Sacred Heart RC Church in Cumbernauld is unassuming from the outside (Image: Mark Gibson)

This particular style of placing stained glass in concrete is called dalle de verre, author Peter Ross explains. It’s the reason he has brought me here today. The first time he walked into this church, he tells me, he was blown away by what he found.

“And it works to one of my ideas about churches which is that these are treasure houses,” Ross continues. “They often seem like unassuming spaces. This is a concrete block of a church in the middle of a council estate in Cumbernauld. And yet it has got what I think is one of the most beautiful sights in the whole country within it and you just wouldn’t know.”

We have come here not just to look at McLellan’s windows, glorious though they are. But to talk about churches in general; about their beauty and their worth and their history and the human stories that suffuse their stones like the coloured light that suffuses this room.

Churches are the subject of Ross’s new book, Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church. The Scottish journalist and writer has gone on a pilgrimage to visit the nation’s cathedrals and parish churches, both ancient and modern (like this one we are sitting in) to discover their secrets and their stories.

It’s a jewellery box of light filtered through stained glass (Image: mark gibson)

“Churches are ubiquitous and they are all around us,” Ross says. “We navigate by them. ‘First turn past the church,’ that kind of thing. They are also, in some senses, hidden spaces. And I was interested in that and that’s what brought me here.”

Completed in 1964, Sacred Heart is one of the 14 modernist Catholic churches built by the architectural practice Gillespie, Kidd and Coia between 1957 and 1972. It is one of around 50 churches Ross visited on his travels while working on the book, ranging from Pluscarden Abbey in Morayshire to Southwark Cathedral in London, and from churches in Norfolk to Northern Ireland.

The result is not a guide book – although it is possible you may find yourself wanting to visit many of the churches he writes about so vividly – but rather an inquiry into how these “ubiquitous” buildings exist in the here and now and the story they tell about our past.

Steeple Chasing is, as you might expect from Ross, itself a beautiful object, full of delicacy and deliberation in the writing: “The solemn loveliness of being inside a country church,” he writes at one point, “comes from decay and use held in perfect balance.”

In some ways, Steeple Chasing grew out of Ross’s previous book, the award-winning A Tomb With A View, which saw him visit cemeteries around the UK and Ireland.

While researching that book he had discovered the story of Sarah Hare who died on April 9, 1744 and whose wax effigy can be seen in a side-chapel in Holy Trinity in Stow Bardolph in Norfolk.

This “wonderful, terrible thing”, as he describes it, was one of the kernels out of which Steeple Chasing sprouted, “this idea,” he says, “that there were extraordinary, strange things inside these buildings.”

But there was more to it than that, he adds.

“In a wider sense I was really looking for some sense of consolation. I was feeling almost despairing about a lot of things in the world around me, in politics and the wider, deeper crisis about the environment.

“And so I was looking for something to take me away from that. And churches seemed to be it because of the sense of deep time and the fact that the people who had inhabited these spaces had gone through a lot of the same things that we continue to go through, whether it’s wars or bad politics or epidemics.

“I found that consolation in a bit of church-crawling and as a writer I wanted to write about it.”

The result is a fascinating, beautifully written book full of both the strange and the terrible, but also full of grace and love. Ross is an inquisitive, engaged traveller who is clearly drawn to these spaces of retreat, of contemplation and, as he says, consolation.

Sitting in the pews at Sacred Heart I ask Ross about what form that consolation might take?

“It’s escapism in a sense. You go to an interesting place, you look at interesting stuff and it takes you out of yourself for a while; the fascination of history and the pleasures of beauty on that basic level.

“There’s also this idea that many generations have passed through this place and found some meaning and comfort in it. I think that’s what I feel – and I’m sure other people do too – when you walk into an older church, especially when you go there alone.

“There’s a smell in an old church, but there’s also a feeling too. And I think that is to do with the accumulated ache of human experience.

“The people who have come to that space, they’ve brought their joy. They’ve come there in love and sorrow and despair and grief and they’ve come to worship and they’ve come to contemplate.

“And all of that has got into the stones. They’ve absorbed that. We can often sense those things.

“If you go into old churches you often see boards with the list of rectors going back centuries and you can identify the years where there were civil wars and plagues.

“So, yeah, it’s the feeling of a continuity and a resilience.”

There are other readings of these buildings available, of course. It may be a reflection of the fact that I grew up in Northern Ireland, a country that has been defined and brutally distorted by its religious discord that I tend to see division rather than continuity. Britain’s story is also a story of religious conflict embodied in the churches we build. Is there a danger, I ask Ross, that he is aestheticising the past?

“I think I am guilty of romanticising the past,” he admits. “But at the same time I think a lot of the stuff you feel when you walk into a church are those negative emotions as well. I don’t forget them. They are definitely part of the feeling.”

Of course the truth is that, like Ross, I love visiting churches too. I love exploring the grandness of cathedrals and the intimacy of parish churches.

These are familiar spaces, sometimes comforting spaces, sometimes, as at Sacred Heart, beautiful spaces. Even if some of us are non-believers, most people in the UK of us have been shaped by Christianity.

And yet, in the 21st century we are increasingly a secular country. Congregations are shrinking, churches are closing, debts are rising. We can all hear “the melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith, as Matthew Arnold put it in his 19th-century poem, Dover Beach.

One wonders if in that sense Ross’s book is something of a eulogy for churches.

“They’re certainly in crisis, aren’t they?” he admits.

“I think that’s also part of their attraction to me in a way. I think I am quite drawn to things that are generally in danger of dying out. That sort of elegiac feeling is something I’m strongly attracted to. It’s right there in Philip Larkin’s poem, Church Going.

“They do face a crisis. They’ve got declining numbers of worshippers, in Anglican churches certainly, while at the same time they all have to pay for roof repairs and everything that needs to be done to keep them going.

“There are huge problems and many will close. It’s undeniable.”

Ross believes there is an argument for state intervention.

“Obviously, the state doesn’t have a lot of money. Everything’s crying out for investment. But it is a problem because you have these incredible historic buildings that are a direct link to our past. They are often full of incredible things, but the financial burden of looking after them falls upon the congregations.

“So there needs to be a way of giving them some sort of investment and protection for the future.

“I believe in France the state pays for the upkeep of churches, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are kept up very well. That’s a flawed system. But it has got to be worth looking at because otherwise a lot of places are going to fall down.”

At the same time, churches are playing a part every day in the social welfare of the country. In the midst of a cost of living crisis and in the face of politicians who often, at best, seem uncaring, the church is stepping up to fill the void, as it always has.

Sacred Heart is no different in that regard. As Father John Campbell, parish priest at Sacred Heart and Saint Lucy’s also in Cumbernauld, points out, a church in the middle of a council estate is inevitably going to be aware of how tough things can be for its congregation.

“You’re living here and so you’re living with the problems that you get in a housing scheme,” he explains.

“On a Monday now we operate a food bank and we feed a three-course meal to about 70 people locally. I look after two parishes here and we have over 200 young people in the youth zone. It started off as a youth club, but a lot of the kids are hungry. So, feeding those kids has become a huge part of what we do.”

This is the reality of 21st-century Britain, a rich country that requires churches to feed the poor.

“People often turn to churches in moments of crisis,” Ross points out.

“The social value of what they do in terms of food banks and community engagement is massively important and was hugely important during the pandemic. That’s another reason to value religion within society.”

Where, you might ask, is God in all this? Ross was himself baptised in the Church of Scotland, at Viewfield in Stirling, but he didn’t really have a religious upbringing and he is very careful in the book not to express what he believes.

Why not? “I think it’s probably a distraction. I don’t want people to think that I’m trying to persuade them of anything. I’m not trying to persuade people to go to church as worshippers.

“I’m not saying churches are special because they are the house of God. I’m saying they are special because for centuries people have believed they are the house of God and therefore they have made them repositories for beauty. I wanted it to be a book that people can come and get something from, whether they have a Christian faith or another faith or no faith at all. But I am respectful and almost admiring maybe of people who do have strong belief. I hope I treat that respectfully but also matter of factly.”

There’s more Philip Larkin than Matthew Arnold in Steeple Chasing, I’d suggest. Ross himself mentions Larkin’s poem Church Going as an inspiration.

“I see myself as that slightly ambling, shambling figure with bicycle clips going into these spaces hoping to be in there alone,” Ross admits.

And at heart Ross’s book is an extrapolation from Larkin’s description of churches in that poem: “A serious house on serious earth it is …”

Last St Andrew’s Day, I tell him, I spent a few hours at Carlisle Cathedral which was then celebrating its 900th anniversary. The canon warden Benjamin Carter and I discussed that very Larkin line.

“Oh, a serious house on a serious Earth it absolutely is,” the canon warden said that day. “I used to reflect on that poem a lot in my rural ministry because you would have these stone buildings.

“Why are they there and what do they do? They remind a forgetful world that God has not forgotten them.”

In other words, God is there if you want to find him. And not always in the most obvious of places.

In his book, Ross visits the Angel of the North on his way to Durham Cathedral in January 2021. Walking up to Antony Gormley’s towering statue, he noticed the trees below were covered in tinsel and mementoes; a makeshift shrine for those departed.

Whether we are believers or not, Ross suggests, we all have a desire for something larger, something beyond human.

“There is a feeling when someone passes; you do want to go and remember them and seek comfort that is beyond the rational world. And that is why people do leave essentially votive offerings at places of obvious symbolism and power like the Angel of the North. Whether people have a formal religious faith or not, I think people have a feeling for the presence of the other world, of the numinous, which is a sort of faith in a way. I think it’s widespread.”

The building we are sitting in is an expression of faith. It is also a reminder that churches are not just artefacts of the distant past. They belong to our lived experience too.

“Absolutely,” Ross agrees. “These Gillespie, Kidd and Coia churches were built for the new towns. They are tremendous expressions of optimism. These were new places for people to move to for better lives. And such places needed an architecture to match and that’s why they built this space.”

But in the end, it is the human stories that fill such buildings that matter most. For Ross that might be the man he met in the church in the Fens who credited God with helping him keep the use of his legs. Or the woman in the “Stanley Spencer chapel” in Hampshire which had helped her with her mental health issues.

“The buildings were made by people and are used by people,” Ross points out. “Those buildings, as beautiful as they are, represent human potential and vulnerability.”

We are the things we make. They tell us the story of our lives through the generations, stretching back and back into history. It is not always a beautiful story. It is full of pain and suffering and destruction and division because that, too, is the human story. But it is also the story of creation. And that can be beautiful. Like this space we are sitting in today.

The light is shining. It falls on all of us.

Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross (Headline, £22) is published on Thursday. Ross will be appearing at Golden Hare Books, Edinburgh on Thursday (goldenharebooks.com), at Topping & Company, St Andrews on May 18 and at Aye Write in Glasgow on May 21