I’m writing with a view of a mountain and the sea interrupted by a mountain. I’m on holiday, and switched my phone off a couple of days ago. It’s been an offline time. Yesterday, we drove north and up to a monastery, and wound up there at noon which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. Still, even with all the people and the traffic and the harsh, midday shadows, there were a few minutes where I sat inside the monastery’s church. From the gloom of a seat at the back I watched other tourists come in and out, and a man scoop up burning candles by the handful, before brusquely extinguishing and dumping them in some kind of hidden candle-bin, so more could be lit. I looked at the chandeliers that hung down from the ceiling, and the way the light fell on the pink-and-white checkerboard floor, and I thought about a church I’d visited in Provence in February, when it was cold. This is something I wrote then.

The trapped air inside an old church always smells the same. I was new in secondary school when a friend told me she’d visited the church in my village over the weekend. “It smelled so dusty!” she scoffed. I don’t remember my reply, but I remember understanding that she’d got it wrong: that the smell of a church is heavier, more substantial than dust. It’s one of cold, worn stone, of faded stillness, of a kind of sanctity.

I’m not religious; l don’t believe in God; but I was brought up in the kind of village where going to church on a Sunday was as much of a communal act as a holy one. It instilled in me a kind of silent permission slip to push, gently, on doors of other churches and know that I am alright to be inside them.

This almost entirely happens away from home - I’ve only popped into a handful of churches and chapels in London, and to do so on a Sunday without a desire to stay for the service would feel disingenuous. But in other parishes, in other countries, I find great, inexplicable comfort in spending a few minutes in these buildings. 

There’s the architectural spectacle, of course. This is what grabs you initially: the clean, arching lines of the Hallgrímskirkja, the parish church of Reykjavík, that soars above the neat little houses that make up the rest of the city. Or the bejewelled, twinkling mosaics inside the domes of St Petersburg’s churches - buildings with poetic names and ticket gates, because they are so plentiful and so decorative you can spend hours seeing only them. The golden egg of a chancel in a windswept, deserted town in the Azores. On Lamb Holm, a small treeless island in Orkney, the swooping landscape is interrupted by the surreal red-and-white filigree of an Italian chapel made from Nissen huts by prisoners of war. 

It is impossible to stand in these - and the countless others besides - and not wonder about who made them.

Perhaps because I recognise the shape, the heft and the trappings of a church (pulpits, rood screens, altars, choir stalls) to walk inside one is to have something novel sheathed over expectation. As a child, I was fortunate enough to be dragged into churches in Spanish hilltop towns and Tuscan villages - this is, I suspect, where the habit came from - and still I will be taken aback by a marble altarpiece or a fading wall of frescos. To take a pew, to sit quietly on a bentwood chair, to look at what has been painted on the ceiling, or not. To see the candles burning, or not.

These things are beautiful and ornate but they are made more so by their surroundings. A stained window is impressive, but to see its coloured sunlight touch dust motes and drying flowers is transcendent. A single, blooming ranunculus becomes miraculous in a building that feels otherwise unchanged by time. When I am in these unfamiliar churches, I gravitate towards the trappings of their congregation: the notice boards and photocopied leaflets about its history, the collection boxes with hand-written labels. The children’s corners and coffee mugs. We are often alone when we visit the churches, and to see these fingerprints is to imagine it on a Sunday: the sound of the organ, the rustling of a choir robe and the soft flicking of a hymn book.

Perhaps that is why these places can be so moving: for the people they have held through the years. Their funerals, their marriages, their baptisms. Their hats and coats. I do not believe in god but I believe in community. I believe in the comfort that others can bring. In some of these places - the tiny chapels tucked into coastal paths; the empty, chilly churches built onto landowners’ estates - these communities are deafening in their absence. Those are the most poignant of all.