Some people follow their football team the length of the country; I will travel as many miles to snoop around a medieval church. If it is friendless, I will traverse brambles and wade through nettles to get to its beauty. Each one is an awesome monument to the artisans who fashioned it, but the textile crafts within are my real grail.

As the daughter of a Royal School of Needlework alumna, I grew up surrounded by copes mounted on huge embroidery frames and gold-work samplers twinkling from every corner of my mother's studio. Her work adorned bishops and altar frontals on high days, but Anglican churches sometimes have a permanent display of more domestic stitching in the form of kneelers or hassocks.