It seems appropriate to make a confession. My partner and I do a lot of walking, always accompanied by the relevant OS map and a compass, and we still manage to get lost.

So if our new-found appreciation of strolling between churches makes us sound like heathens, you must appreciate that a) that is what we are; and b) the discovery that church spires make failsafe marker-posts means that in future we will stand a better chance of reaching the car in time for the classified football results.

True, a flat landscape helps, and they don’t come flatter than Lincolnshire. We began at St Michael’s at Stragglethorpe, a tiny Saxon-Norman church that has yet to be introduced to electricity and is flooded with natural light.

I liked its simplicity: an ancient rickety piano, a double-decker pulpit that enables an elevated vicar to deliver bombast and a conversational speaker to stand at the congregation’s level. Eighteenth-century box pews remain, incongruously vast. St Michael’s is often locked but visitors can borrow the key from the farm opposite.

We took the road to St Helen’s at Brant Broughton (pictured on the cover), a classic English church stuffed with intriguing detail. For me, the joy lies in the 14th-century stonework, which has such a range of creatures that it is almost a zoo.

There are geckos, gargoyles and a little man who is dropping his trousers — a reassuring sign of mischief before political correctness. More reverent visitors may prefer the legacy of Canon Frederick Heathcote Sutton, who restored the medieval interior in the 1870s.

After lunch we took a path out of the village, heading for the distant spire of St Swithun, Leadenham, its Pugin ceiling — and another pantomime devil.

We crossed turnip fields on paths overgrown with wild flowers, and the spire beckoned us on. It’s an affluent place, Leadenham, with elegant polo horses and creamy stone houses into which you can’t see.

No matter, we were heading for Stragglethorpe and when we lost the path again, we just headed to the left of Brant Broughton spire. It worked. We made it to the car in time for news of a nil-nil draw.