IF THERE is one thing even better than taking a turn around old churches, it is doing so in the company of an expert. The stonemason Andrew Ziminski fits the bill perfectly. Ancient Wessex is his home turf, but his projects, these past 35 years, have taken him to all corners of Great Britain and Ireland. Whether it be replacing stolen lead, rehanging bells, reframing stained-glass windows, or preventing the surface of priceless wall-paintings from further flaking away, he has worked alongside someone who knows all about doing it.
This new volume is the follow-up to his acclaimed The Stonemason: A history of building Britain in 2020, and the vigour and wonder of his prose remains beguiling. By organising his thoughts as if church-crawling round a generic building — from his first section “In and Around The Churchyard”, then “The Church Exterior”, and finally “The Church Interior” — he picks out individual features and then quotes peerless examples he has worked on in churches all over the country.
It does inevitably have a slightly breathless quality, an occasional dizziness as you move from one paragraph to the next from a detached bell tower at Clonmacnoise, on the rugged banks of the River Shannon, on the site of one of Ireland’s greatest Celtic monasteries, to the gigantic teepee from the 1260s which adjoins St Augustine’s, Brookland, in gentler Kent.
There is plenty to learn, though. Sheela-na-Gigs and Sean-na-Gigs were new to me. The naked carved female figure apparently delighting in having no fig-leaf at the tiny 12th-century church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck, in Herefordshire, is one of just 40 surviving Sheelas in the British Isles. To see a Sheela and her male counterpart, Sean, you have to go all the way to St Clement’s, Rodel, on the Isle of Harris, and gaze up at the exhibitionist pair on the tower.
Prudes may wish to spare themselves the exertion, but, from Devil’s Doors to Angel Roofs, Ziminski offers the lot, along with some welcome positive thinking. “I suspect [these churches] will continue to be used for another thousand years,” he concludes, “for whatever version of religious faith comes along next.”
Peter Stanford is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster, and the author of If These Stones Could Talk: The history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland through 20 buildings (Hodder, 2021).
Church Going: A stonemason’s guide to the churches of the British Isles
Andrew Ziminski
Profile £25
(978-1-80081-868-2)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50