Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles. By Andrew Ziminski. London, Profile Books, 2024. Pp. 401. Price £25 (hbk). ISBN 9781800818682.
Reviewed by: Patrick Comerford, Milton Keynes
Among the many groups on social media that I contribute to actively, “Church Crawlers Anonymous” on Facebook is mainly for people who “church crawl” and photograph churches as a hobby and for people with an interest in ecclesiology. But the reasons people have for “church crawling” as a hobby are broader than the criteria for membership. Apart from clergy, liturgists and regular churchgoers, there are people who visit churches simply because they appreciate stained glass windows or furnishings and fittings, organs and bells, the architectural as well as social and local history, monuments, old tombs or the tiles.
Their reasons are many, some may have little or no faith or beliefs, but all appreciate the heritage of old churches and their place in preserving local history and bringing it alive.
Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason, church conservator and author who lives and works in Frome, Somerset. For over 40 years, he has worked on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain, including the tower of Salisbury Cathedral and the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London. During this career, he admits, he has become “an inveterate church crawler” and says he has visited over half of the 11,000 or so churches of medieval origin in Britain and Ireland. Building on the critical acclaim of his first book, The Stonemason, he has written this second book, Church Going, as his own handbook to the architecture, fixtures, furnishings, and artworks in those churches.
Ziminski realises churches are many things to many people: they are places of worship, they are vibrant community hubs and they are oases of reflection. To know a church is to hold a key to the past that unlocks an understanding of shared history. This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a celebration of British and Irish architectural history, in which he looks at the histories, features and furnishings of churches, from flying buttresses to rood screens, lichgates to chancels and gargoyles. He begins by inviting us to walk around the churchyard, then looking at the exterior of a church, and takes an interlude to look at the birds, bees and bats, the bells and the ancient graffiti. He then takes us inside to see the porch, the nave, roofs and vaults, and takes a second interlude, with a “Note on Purgatory,” before continuing with the font, wall paintings and furnishings, benches, pews and galleries, interior memorials, devotional and memorial chapels, the chancel arch and its furnishings, the chancel, the altar and sanctuary, the vestry, charnel houses and the apse and crypt.
A walk on the beach in Strandhill, Co. Sligo, led him to search for the reliquary of Saint Patrick’s tooth in the National Museum in Dublin. He recounts the theft and recovery of the reliquary at Saint Manchan’s Church in Boher, Co. Offaly. The “most recent and most disturbing shrine” he has seen is the head of Oliver Plunkett enshrined in Saint Peter’s Church, Drogheda: “seeing his head with its wisps of hair grinning back at you through the thick glass window at the base of the brass spire that covers him today is a moving experience, no matter what your faith is.”
He believes the “pencil-shaped bell towers of Ireland” or round towers “are perhaps Ireland’s greatest gift to architecture.” He is particularly descriptive of the towers in Clonmacnoise and Kildare, and asks why “the style of the stone-built Irish detached round tower didn’t catch on within mainland Britain.” On the other hand, the towers and spires in England that have attracted his attention include Christopher Wren’s spire on Saint Bride’s in Fleet Street in London, the inspiration for many a bride’s choice of a tiered wedding cake, and admires Nicholas Hawksmoor’s eccentric spire at Saint George’s, Bloomsbury – inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – with its fighting lion and unicorn, an elongated pyramid, and nineteen steps leading up to a statue of George I clad in a Roman toga.
There are humorous vignettes. Once arriving at a church in Wiltshire to meet an architect to discuss lightning damage to a the spire of a village church, he was asked quizzically, “Do you know how to build a spire?” He gave the one reply he had been waiting his whole career to deliver, “Well, up to a point.” It was an appropriate response, for this book is a collection of lightning strikes. The churches Ziminski visits are chosen randomly, a choice influenced by where he has lived, worked or spent holidays. This means there are whole swathes of England that are not referred to or discussed. There are no college chapels in Cambridge or Oxford. There is not one single church in Staffordshire, with its interesting collection of collegiate churches, including Penkridge, with graffiti grooves in the stonework left behind by practicing arches. There are few references to the great cathedrals of England, with only passing references to York Minister, the largest cathedral completed in the Gothic period, or Norwich, with the largest monastic cloister in Britain, and none to Lichfield, the only medieval cathedral in England with three spires.
Of course a stonemason is going to be interested in Gallarus Oratory in Co. Kerry, with its early stonework, but he does not look at the debates about its purpose and function. How could any church crawler visiting the medieval churches and monasteries in Ireland – particularly a stonemason – neglect to visit the cathedrals in Killaloe and Clonfert or Saint Cronan’s Church in Tuamgraney?
This is an entertaining book, to dip into and out of. But it is certainly not a comprehensive guide to medieval churches in England, still less to the medieval churches of these islands. It is personal, it is amusing, it is delightful. However, I shall continue to take my Pevsner’s guides with me on every church crawling escapade.
This book review is published in the Irish Theological Quarterly (Pontifical University, Maynooth), Volume 90 Issue 2, April 2025, pp 239-240
