The high life of stonemason James Preston

The impact had shattered the churchyard path. Chunks of asphalt and mortar lay in the surrounding grass. Just next to the path, like a broken chess piece, lay the remnants of the church’s 150-year-old spire. A few hours earlier, it had stood at the very top of the church, towering over the churchyard. Mercifully, the Victorian construction had fallen to earth rather than through the church roof. For reasons now lost, St Thomas’ in Wells is one of the very few English churches with a spire to the north-east corner.

The list of people one can call for such emergencies is not long. In the event it was 37-year-old James Preston who picked up the phone. Preston is a stonemason and steeplejack whose work has seen him dangle from almost all the historic buildings you’d find in the Ladybird Book of English History: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, Longleat, the Radcliffe Camera and Whitby Abbey, to name but a few.

The spire’s fall, captured on video by a neighbour, took place at the height of Storm Eunice in February. When I meet Preston six months later, he shows me the workshop where the new spire is being made and takes me to St Thomas’ church itself. A 20-mile drive intervenes, and Preston – stubbled and tanned – tells me about the various stone varieties of the West Country. Geologically speaking, we’re at the bottom of a band of oolitic limestone that curves, via Oxford and Bath, all the way up to York, formed during the Jurassic period when much of the Cotswolds was under tropical seas. Look closely at the fine Georgian townhouses in Bath or the little Gloucestershire weavers’ cottages and you’ll see ancient shells and the fossilised remains of ancestral starfish.