Award-winning journalist Peter Ross is an expert in finding extraordinary stories in unlikely places. A Tomb With a View, published in 2020, explored the graveyards of the UK and Ireland. His new book, Steeple Chasing, takes British churches as its focus—buildings that have stood for millennia, outlasting wars, plagues, countless monarchs and deep religious schisms. It’s a history that could be read in their architecture, but Ross prefers telling their human stories: “There is,” he says, “a sort of solidarity that I get from the past. A sense of the worshippers being kind of present even now. There’s something quite neighborly about it.”

Okechukwu Nzelu: How did you come to write Steeple Chasing? 

Peter Ross: I was planning to write the book before COVID, but started in the early days of the pandemic, when it was uncertain how long it was going to last. I wanted to find something consoling to write about. I think that was rooted not just in COVID, but in the wider political situation and my pessimism about the climate emergency. I wanted to escape the present, to feel comforted and buttressed by the deep past. On a more practical level, it emerged naturally from A Tomb With a View: They’re both to do with the marks we leave on the earth and stone. It’s about trying to say, We were here, and on some level, we mattered.

ON: Which writers influence your writing?