He wrote: “…steeplechasing has about it rather more glamour and excitement than the flat, a trace of chivalry, a spice of danger and a refreshing vigor that…. S. soil 80 years ago at Grassland Downs, a 24-square-mile (62km 2) course located in Gallatin, TN between 1929 and 1932. 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.

He tracks down effigies so life-like that they could be horror film extras, talks to steeplejacks about working on buildings that sway in the wind, and tells a story about a Norfolk man who stopped satanists using the local village church and then – in a scene that could come straight from JL Carr’s A Month in the Country – uncovers 11th century paintings of angels on its nave walls. In the late 1800s, he built a steeplechase training center on his 3,000-acre (12km 2) property in Aiken, South Carolina and trained horses imported from England.A design that has lasted 500 years might well be “well” enough, and who determines where is right and where is home? Both Cocks and Bostwick trained under Brose Clark on Long Island, while Bassett handled the horses of Marion duPont, who would later marry actor Randolph Scott. From cathedrals to tiny crumbling parish churches, Peter Ross celebrates each one with the same attention to detail and praise for the people who look after them, sometimes as interesting as the churches.

In 2021, jumps racing in Australia was only run in Victoria and South Australia, though, contrary to common belief, only New South Wales had banned it. Clark held many important chases on his Brookville (Long Island) estate, Broad Hollow, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Maybe the sea of faith is these days just a tideless, emptying pool, but as long as those buildings are there to remind us what it was, our horizons widen retrospectively across centuries, and we can imagine what faith must have felt like even if we no longer feel it ourselves. The most distinguishable landmarks in the 17th century British Isles were the tall church steeples; races were from one steeple to another, usually between two and four miles apart and with various obstacles in between. As the head of a charity dedicated to rescuing such buildings points out, ‘These buildings transcend time. A three-time Eclipse Award winner, he won the Grand National at Far Hills five times and won the Colonial Cup in each of his championship seasons.

Historians seldom agree with one another about much of anything and horsemen are renowned for their wildly differing opinions, but amazingly, there is a consensus about the origins of steeplechasing.

In 1934, the Rose Tree Hunt, located just to the west of Philadelphia, advertised that it would stage its 75th annual fall race meeting that year, thus tracing its inaugural meet to 1860, a year before the Civil War began. When we have school parties we have to walk on quickly when we get to this bit,” the churchwarden tells him. This extends even to those who do not attend; though I have been known to grumble when there is news of a local petition to save a church from closure (and this will be happening more and more) that it would not be closing if every signatory also came to a service. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand. The name comes from jump racing’s origins in Ireland, when young men would race their horses from church steeple to church steeple jumping any and all obstacles in between.

He also shivers at the creepy wax effigy of Sarah Hare, a member of the local gentry who has stared out from her cabinet in Holy Trinity, Stow Bardolph, since 1744: “a wonderful, terrible thing… She brings to mind Dorian Gray, Miss Havisham, the ending of Don’t Look Now. Ross’s pilgrimage takes in the melancholic beauty of Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh, “a sigh made of stone”. Cookham, that Stanley Spencer made the backdrop to his work, is a different entity to the painter Alison Watt’s relationship with Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh.Perhaps the best glance into the method here is right at the start, when Ross encounters a pew box in St Mary’s Whitby with the legend “For Strangers Only”. The earnings record would fall the following decade when McDynamo took to the steeplechase racecourse.