Book review: Highways and Byways - Discovering Catholic England

Highways and Byways - Discovering Catholic England, by Nicholas Schofield - Gracewing

Reading this book was pure pleasure. I studied history at school and university and became a Roman Catholic partly as a result of it. I have never met the book's author, Fr Nicholas Schofield, a priest of Westminster Diocese, but I would love to accompany him to one of his favourite historical sites to hear him speak about it and bring it alive. This is what the book does with a selection of Fr Schofield's favourite places - it brings their past alive.

The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive guide to places of significance to the Catholic history of England. It is a delightful collection of descriptions of places visited on holidays and days off, explaining their link to Catholic history, both pre- and post-Reformation.

Some of the sites included (notably Canterbury, Ramsgate, Rochester, Romney Marsh and Battle) are places I thought I knew well, but I learnt new things through reading this book. Others (including Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, Old St Pancras Church, Glastonbury Abbey, Durham Cathedral) are places I have visited but only as a nodding acquaintance. Some (particularly Dorchester on Thames and Whitby) are places I have always wanted to visit, never managed to do so, and am now determined to visit under inspiration from this text. And still others (like Shap Abbey) I had never even heard of, and some I had to go looking for on a map.

What an inspiration! It reminds me that, at least for a lover of Church history, you don't have to leave the country to find beautiful places of great interest, which is helpful if you are on a tight budget. If you are on a really tight budget, or age or disability has reduced your ability to travel, this book can help reduce costs radically, because it is so vividly written that I travelled to most of the places described in my imagination, saving a fortune in train fares.

You might ask, why bother with a book about Catholic history? Isn't it a bit sectarian? Not a bit of it! Fr Schofield is perfectly clear about the depth of his Catholic faith and how much he values the Catholic history of England, but without in any way indulging in cheap points-scoring or undervaluing other people's faith. In any case, we cannot understand English history without understanding the role that the Catholic Church played in uniting the warring Anglo-Saxon tribes in the 7th century and then uniting the English with their Danish invaders in the 9th. And we might do well to remind ourselves of how much our Catholic forebears suffered to maintain their faith under persecution in the religious turbulence of the 16th and 17th centuries. It might inspire us to believe that we have something of eternal value to offer our contemporaries, and to do so with courage and humility.

Highways and Byways - Discovering Catholic England, by Nicholas Schofield, was published in February 2024 by Gracewing, ISBN 978 085244 720 8, 312 pages, £15.99.