Churches are imagined as still and quiet, but in Church Crawling even the most humble-seeming and overlooked church is revealed to be teeming with life and drama.

The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways.

Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, carved beams and crypts, their jumble of furniture and oddities, Morley shows these buildings to be the living expression of centuries of communal history and folk culture, time capsules of wonder and connection. The stories they contain are both boisterous and tender, raucous and sublime, transporting us to the ancient and medieval past, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble.

Often the oldest and most significant building in a settlement, churches are where for centuries births have been celebrated, relationships consecrated and deaths memorialised, where the great and enduring mysteries have been contemplated, and where the ghosts of countless, unnamed, normal lives are to be found. As Rachel Morley shows, the concentration of human experience within their walls is so rich and so layered, that they offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.