A transporting and gloriously entertaining journey through the hidden lives of England’s rural parish churches – from building conservator and church ‘rescuer’ Rachel Morley

The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Rachel Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a dusty village church, only to have 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, their jumble of furniture and curios, Morley shows these buildings to be the expression of centuries of communal memory and folk culture – time capsules of connection to ancient and medieval ways of thinking, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. Along our journey we meet the Lincolnshire hermit who squeezed a devil from a man with his belt, the lovers struck by lightning before they could get married and the rope-sliding steeplejack who flew from a spire – before falling to his death. We discover the folk cure, ‘poor man’s aspirin’, and how it explains the gashes in church walls, we follow Victor Frankenstein into a charnel house to collect parts for his monster, and we learn how Thomas Hardy’s heart got eaten by a cat.

Too many of England’s fifteen thousand parish churches are now neglected and crumbling. Church Crawling helps us to see them for what they really are: places that thrum with the drama of life, and an incomparable treasure trove that offers as close an encounter with our past as it is possible to get.