In the summer of 1992, Gloria Davey came upon a ruined church near Swaffham in Norfolk. It had no roof, no windows and no door. Satanists were using it for their rites; a grave had been opened, giving up its bones. Gloria’s husband Bob felt obliged to act. He disrupted their rituals, and when they threatened to kill him, he called in the local Territorial Army. They didn’t bother him again.

Bob Davey was 73 when Gloria found the late 11th-century church of St Mary, in Houghton on the Hill; he died, aged 91, having visited it every day thereafter. He and a small group of friends built a mile-long access road and made the church watertight – made it good again, you might say. Then a kind of miracle happened. Beneath the white plaster on the walls of the nave, he discovered the oldest known depiction of the Last Judgment in England, and the only known one of Noah’s Ark.

There are some 10,000 medieval churches left in England alone. They need us to survive. But, asks Peter Ross in his delightful book, do we still need them? Steeple Chasing is an extended exercise in what John Betjeman called ‘church crawling’. Ross extends his remit to include other places where people have anchored deep meanings, among them the Angel of the North. Church attendance is in decline; yet cathedral visitor numbers are booming. Perhaps people now want to worship differently; perhaps they don’t even want to call it worship. ‘You pray as you can, not as you can’t,’ a monk at Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin, tells Ross.

It is human to make places sacral. Churches, by virtue of centuries of such work, are the most profoundly human places we can be in: hands hewed the stone, bent the iron and cut the glass; the very walls are steeped in prayer and song. They may not be places that we go to for answers any more, but they are still places we go to to make peace with the questions. Ross writes: ‘Break open a piece from an old church wall and you might find joy and grief spiralling, ammonite-like, through the stone.’

He began the book in 2020. Covid’s shadow hangs over his travels: the fear of it, the dread, the loneliness. But there is a wider sense of frailty: ‘Rickety old Britain, one hard wind from the fall.’ There are other shadows too: war in Ukraine, migrant crossings, environmental catastrophe. Do churches still have something to offer people – perhaps a nation, a culture – in crisis?

At a material level, yes. There was something cheering, Ross writes, about places of worship being used as vaccination centres. He visits St Martin-in-the-Fields, which ministers to London’s homeless migrants, ‘the least and the last and the lost’. It is an old Christian duty, but the church has taken it to heart for decades. The Royal Mail once had to process a letter addressed to ‘God, somewhere in the world’. They delivered it to St Martin-in-the-Fields.

But is there more? Benedictine monks, Ross writes, are present in three zones at once: the deep past, the here and now, and eternity. Implicitly, churches teach us that we all are. An elderly woman thinks of Lindisfarne’s presiding saints Aidan and Cuthbert as ‘living personalities… just as alive as we are, though in a different state’.

Out of this, two related themes develop. One is transformation. ‘These were trees once,’ Ross writes of medieval angel carving among the hammerbeam roofs of East Anglian churches. ‘In time, they felt the kiss of the axe… and began to take shape, to become angelic.’ And again, reflecting on Stanley Spencer’s art, which infuses his first world war experiences with Christian eschatology: ‘It is fitting that a man’s pain should become art here, and that the pain of others should, on seeing that art, be soothed.’

The other theme is reciprocity: ‘You are entering a building,’ Ross says, ‘but really it is entering you.’ It’s an idea that runs through the book like water through limestone. To sing Gregorian chant isn’t to echo the past, it’s to participate in it. ‘There may only be 18 monks in the church now,’ he writes of Pluscarden, ‘but there are hundreds in a line stretching back through the generations, and they are somehow in the music too.’ ‘You shape yourself in shaping the stone,’ a mason at Gloucester cathedral tells him.

Reading a book is another reciprocal act: if it’s good, it stays with you. Ross’s readers will have his words humming through them for a long time.