Times Church Walks in.... Suffolk, north Dorset and Lincolnshire

We may have little idea what to do with our churches, and may largely have given up worshipping in them, but just imagine our countryside without them.

I was brought up as a Roman Catholic who always felt slightly miffed about the inferior architecture of the churches that we recusants had to make do with, then lapsed in my mid-teens and so lack credentials as a churchgoer in the traditional Anglican sense.

But I am a church-goer in the other, agnostic, sense defined by Philip Larkin in Church Going — wherever I go in the UK I gravitate towards these ancient places, the most venerable of all the people-sheltering spaces we possess. Times Walks: the 100 best walks in the UK Find your favourite ramble, print it out, pack your rucksack, and head out into the countryside or city The Sunday Times best summer walks Related Links Times Walks: the 100 best walks in the UK Times Walks: churches on the Suffolk coast Times Walks: churches in the Lincolnshire flatlands

Staying with friends in the Black Mountains in Mid Wales not long ago, I came across a tiny, isolated church on a steep hillside. Venturing in through the small porch, I found myself facing an exquisite carved wooden rood-screen dividing nave from choir.

Somehow this fragile, delicate thing escaped the iconoclasts who obliterated more than 90 per cent of British medieval art during the Reformation. The screen is not the only treasure of the chapel of Partrishow; on the walls are medieval murals which depict the Doom with a starkness that still stops you in your tracks.

Ancient, autochthonous, unostentatiously beautiful, the chapel of Partrishow encapsulates much of what is special and supremely valuable about our churches. This was the hermitage of the Celtic Saint Issui, a place of worship for a thousand years. Here something for which there is no better word than holy has been, in Larkin’s words, “brewed God knows how long”.

Most of our churches are not so isolated. In fact, when I think of an English church the first image that comes to mind is of a church tower rising above the roofs of a village that are clustered round it, looking up to it for protection and inspiration. In our largely flat or flattish land, church towers and spires hold a special place; they focus and give point to the landscape.

Nowhere is this more true than in East Anglia. If I had to choose one county for churches it would be Suffolk; appropriate, then, that Suffolk County Churches Trust was the first to launch a sponsored bike ride 27 years ago, the inspiration for next week’s Ride+Stride event.

Enriched by the wool trade, then reduced to backwater status for centuries, Suffolk holds more than its fair share of magnificent churches, whose towers rise proudly above the gentle fields and melancholy marshlands.

You might think of grand quasi-cathedrals such as Long Melford and Blythburgh, or the flint-faced St Bartholomew’s in Orford, with its immensely strong tower. But a more modest church holds a special place in my affections.

It is St Botolph’s, Iken, which you can see rising over the reed beds from the Maltings at Snape. When you get to St Botolph’s, just above the Alde estuary, the interior is simple and plain but it’s good to know that the bells installed in the 16th century have never been moved.