With many churches facing closure due to falling rolls and falling income, it is clear throughout the book that churches are not just places of worship but play a vital role in communities. This can take many forms such as running a foodbank or soup kitchen, providing a welcoming safe space for anyone who needs it, being the place where addiction support groups, counselling groups, youth organisations, toddlers groups and so much more take place. When the buildings go, what will happen to these vital services? The Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy is a Team Vicar in the Savernake Team Ministry. He is the author of Tales of a Country Parish (Short Books, 2022). Auteuil in Paris is the best known racecourse in France for French jump racing, with the biggest jumps, along with Pau. The Grand Steeple Grade I race is held at Auteuil in June.

The National Steeplechase Museum is situated on the grounds of historic Springdale Race Course in Camden, South Carolina. We are the only Museum in the United States dedicated solely to steeplechasing — from its beginnings in the British Isles to its evolution in America.An ancient and beautiful church fulfils its primary function merely by existing,” said Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, the founder of the heritage charity Friends of Friendless Churches. “It is, in itself, and irrespective of the members using it, an act of worship.” Peters journey around this steepled isle was intriguing and fascinating to behold. The people he met along the way fabulous, and the cats regal. His writing style is second to none and his passion for his subject and the privilege he feels when meeting both places and people is palpable. That’s how we are with death these days: increasingly, we’re giving it the cold, secular shoulder. We don’t want religious funerals in churches or chapels (none of my last four were), so the numbers have dropped by 80 per cent in the last decade. Bad news for the clergy and undertakers is good news for supermarkets and off-licences: according to the Co-op – which conducts 100,000 funerals a year – 21 per cent of us feel that the wake is more important than the funeral service.

Steeplechasing has been part of the Olympic programme for over 100 years. In the early days there were two distances and Britain won medals on a regular basis. In the 1950s and 1960s John Disley, Chris Brasher and Maurice Herriott all won Olympic medals and in the 1980s, Colin Reitz and Mark Rowland gained medals at the World Championships and Olympic Games respectively. Recently, things have been a little sparse for Britain but the event still retains its romance despite the abuse it receives in regional league meetings. So where does this leave Britain’s churches, those great traditional portals on the infinite? If we have lost faith in Christianity so much that we don’t even want to use its rites at the one moment when they might offer consolation, what’s the point in keeping churches open in the first place? As congregations dwindle and roof repair bills rise, can they ever be anything more than a costly irrelevance?

From the author of A Tomb With a View– a celebration of the weird and wonderful churches of Britain

Steeplechasing found its way to the United States through the fox-hunting field and had established itself within a few years after Lottery won the first Grand National. The sport’s first footholds were in Long Island, Maryland, Virginia, and eastern Pennsylvania, and steeplechasing soon spread to the Carolinas, Georgia, Massachusetts, and other states. Buildings like Old St Paul’s seem to stand outside time in a way that would make perfect sense to quite a number of people Ross interviews. At Durham, the aged guide talks about St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede as though they are both still living; at Lindisfarne, the former curate of the church next to the priory, tells him that as far as she is concerned Saints Aidan and Cuthbert ‘are just as alive as we are, though in a different state’. And although I wouldn’t go quite so far, I do think that knowledge of the past can, by making us aware of the fleetingness of our own lives, can gift us, however briefly, a sense of timelessness. Of all the reasons for taking up the hobby of what John Betjeman called ‘church-crawling’ – which Ross, tongue only slightly in cheek, suggests ought to be as popular as Munro-bagging – this is, I suspect, the one that chimes the loudest with him: that nowhere else do the past and present slip so easily into each other.Despite his breathless itinerary, Ross allows each church that he visits to breathe, and to offer up its peculiar story. He is no dispassionate purveyor of curiosities: he cares, and cares deeply, situating each church in its history and in the lives of those who love it. The cumulative effect is at once celebratory and elegiac. The first recorded hurdle race took place at Durdham Down near Bristol in 1821. There were 5 hurdles on the mile long course, and the race was run in three heats. [4] Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Collectively, Great Britain and Ireland account for over 50% of all jump races worldwide, carding 4,800 races over fences in 2008. Jump racing in Great Britain and Ireland is officially known as National Hunt racing.