Within a day’s hike from my house in a quiet corner of Kent, there are at least four ruined or abandoned chapels. My father, a retired Anglican clergyman who likes to keep his hand in, takes a regular service in a church that dates back eight centuries. An hour’s drive across the county brings you to the spectacular remains of St Mary’s, Reculver, which was begun almost 1400 years ago after St Augustine converted the Kentish kings at the start of his mission to the Anglo-Saxons.
When I lived in Oxford, it took barely an hour to stroll out along the Thames to the ruins of Godstow Abbey, a nunnery dissolved by Henry VIII which has been gradually falling down for 400 years since being badly damaged in the English Civil War. In the very centre of the city, at St Michael at the Northgate, you could drink coffee and browse books at the foot of a tower that was completed before the Norman Conquest.
