Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 18 September 2026

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Author Rachel Morley checking out the quatrefoils at York Minster in 2017

Words

"In essence this is what England's parish churches provide: places saturated with human experience, experience lived and repeated within four walls over and over again. This is their great potency and their unbreakable power: a chain of people - the kind-greedy-pious-manipulative-lazy-bereft-jealous-content-moody-lustful-cruel-lonely-elated-worried-boring."

Church Crawling, Rachel Morley

Observations

Churchin'

I lodge with Steve near Burford.

It isn’t really lodging. It's more like the perfect storm of late-evening, chatter-fuelled-church-crawling from one village to the next in Steve’s ancient Ford Pickup which has over 300 000 miles on the clock.

“What’s that tapping?” I say, as we hurtle through the lanes. “It’s outside, I’ve fashioned a new aerial for the van.” He winds down the window and reaches out to relocate the coat-hanger wire. “Never mind that,” he says, “We’re off out churchin'. We’ve got some real gems to see tonight - apotropaics up to our armpits.”

It’s a rollercoaster ride in off-road tyres, through the grouse-strewn, pheasant-clotted back lanes of the Cotswolds. Villages pass by that have never seen a tourist. Their names slip off the tongue like a Betjeman poem:

Toddington, Oddington, Stanway,

Sherborne, Westwell and Windrush.

We pass pubs with nooks that only harbour locals, hunkered down in Barbours, with pointers by their laps and pints and chasers on their tables.

The roads curve and rise. Cow-parsley curtsies in the down-draught. Sometimes the lanes are hedged, other times they’re dry-stone topped with cocks-comb copings. We dip into tracks that rarely see the light of day, vaulted by an entanglement of trees. Every now and then they’re punctured by a grandiose gateway or a lodge house to an estate. Beyond the tree line, follies and spires twist and angle into view and are gone as quickly as they arrive.

Later in the day the sun cajoles us, blinds us, stops us in our tracks and then hides behind a copse. A narrow road leads to a crooked church - walls leaning, porch dotted with mass dials. The truck sidles up an embankment and screeches to a halt in a cloud of dust.

Doors slammed shut, Steve, like a snake charmer, takes me through the Georgian-hooped-gateway, past the peeking beakheads to the treasures that await inside the ancient church of St. Peter’s in the village of Windrush in Gloucestershire.

We walk into the darkened nave and instantly I’m taken by a sheep’s head carved into a mould stop over an arch. I stand and look at the detailing. I take my iPhone out and take a quick snap.

It’s quiet, apart from the rustle of leaves and the coo of a collared dove. Steve is inspecting the chancel arch for graffiti. I finish photographing the sheep’s head and stand and watch Steve, then look back to the carving.

About 40,000 years, 8 minutes and 20 seconds before this moment, several atoms at the core of the sun, about 150 million kilometres from here, are subject to an act of nuclear fusion. The resulting light, which has taken millennia to sift through the sun’s layers, glints across space in minutes and finds itself heading towards a small island in the northern hemisphere.

Fifteen seconds later, it is over the great county of Gloucestershire, and 3 seconds after that, it takes a precarious path over the Windrush village rooftops and then percolates through an intricate tapestry of leaves, the handmade glass of the west window and the dusty motes of an ancient nave. About 1 second before it hits the sheep’s head, I put my iPhone away and take one last look at the carving.

Then it hits.

Instantly the animal is alive - its head is a blintering mass of moving light which spills out onto the column behind, begetting the head with a sparkling, animated body.

About 600 years ago, when the light I see now was part way through the sun’s corona, a medieval mind might put such animation down to God’s work: a message from beyond. Here and now, in this present moment, with my scientific mind I’m forced to acknowledge the how and why of what is happening, but something deep inside curtails my Darwinian bent, and for several minutes, immerses me in the magic of the moment.

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*Churchin' was first written in 2022 and I've included it here to celebrate the launch of Rachel Morley's book: Church Crawling.

Hotspots

Church Crawling by Rachel Morley

I’ve known Rachel for some time and, every time we have met, I’ve come away inspired by her enthusiasm and her deeply rooted knowledge and understanding of churches. But her passion reaches beyond the material - it comes from an understanding of human nature and a remarkable ability to hold the long view.

For me, Church Crawling isn’t just about churches. It is about the things we entrust to them, sometimes without realising it. Through them, we find ourselves in the company of people we will never meet, but whose hopes, anxieties and need to belong are recognisably our own.

There is a way of seeing here that I feel has become blurred in our modern times - an understanding that we can act across generations, contributing to something we neither began nor will see completed. These places allow us to speak together across the centuries, each generation adding its voice to those already present - a shared expression shaped by hands that have never met, with the church itself providing both a common bond and a conduit.

Within these repositories of memory, I recognise something sacred to our humanity, whether or not we hold a religious faith. It is the willingness to care for something beyond the span of our own lives - to leave room for those who will follow, whilst keeping faith with those who came before.

This is a delightful exploration of our church heritage, but, more than that, it is a philosophy of care and belonging - an invitation to recover that way of seeing, to understand what we have inherited and to consider what we might pass on.