Cold comfort carollers

St Mary's remains for all that, still used on high days and holy days and thronged last Sunday afternoon for a Christmas celebration of Nine Lessons and Carols. It was a splendid if somewhat parky occasion, the congregation happily able to generate both a heat and light of its own.

Somewhere between Darlington and Northallerton, East and North Cowton are bigger and better known, boasting even a butcher's and a bit of a bus service.

Said in the villagers' villages' history to have been "prosperous" and "densely populated", South Cowton disappeared in medieval times, now archaeologically identified by bumps in the fields.

St Mary's, down a pot-holed road to nowhere much else at all, was built in the late 15th century at much the same time as South Cowton Castle, still inhabited.

It was curious, therefore, that shortly after erecting the church, Sir Richard Conyers should evict his tenants and demolish the village, though a yet greater scandal arose soon afterwards.

Conyers's grandson Richard Bowes, who'd inherited Cowton Castle, had fathered 12 children by his wife Elizabeth when, at the age of 50, Elizabeth heard the Scottish religious reformer John Knox speak in Berwick and thereafter spent most of her life with him.

Not least by Robert Louis Stevenson, the relationship was believed intimate. Back home in South Cowton, Richard and the deserted dozen were said in the village history to have been "most upset" and may have felt yet more aggrieved when Knox married Margorie, one of the Bowes's daughters.

"Whether this improved matters is hard to judge," adds the history sagaciously, but the zealot, he who trumpeted against the monstrous regiment of women, may neither have been first nor last not entirely to practise what he preached.

Poor Richard Bowes had learned at the School of Hard Knox.

Dedicated to St Cuthbert, an earlier church on the site had reputedly been one of the Durham monks' resting places on their great journey with the saint's remains.

St Mary's, restored in 1882, has externally changed little in 500 years. A short guide describes its appearance as "severely military", the history supposes it "lively perpendicular."

In the 1970s, inarguably, they discovered dry rot in the roof. Helped by grants, the folk of the Cowtons raised £20,000 for repairs. When another beam ends infestation was discovered, it was felt that the parishioners could be asked to give no more.

The Redundant Churches Fund, recently renamed the Churches Conservation Trust - "connotations" someone said on Sunday - took it over in 1988 and has spent an estimated £130,000 to restore the Grade I listed building.

"People were happy to raise money the first time but we couldn't really ask them again," said Barbara Ingall, one of the Cowtons' churchwardens.

"The ironic thing was that the people who complained the loudest about the closure were those who never came."

William White, his family at North Cowton Manor since 1740 - "five other Willie Whites in that graveyard" - reckons they might have had 20 in on a good Sunday, many fewer if it rained.

"It's a lovely old church but you just need go outside and look round in any direction. There simply aren't any people."

The Trust, housed in Fleet Street where once the inky tradesmen toiled, allows occasional services but imposes strict conditions - among them that heating is restricted to the use of an air blower before the service. Something to do with condensation, apparently.

It didn't much matter when last the church was used, when they'd raised the song of harvest home and held plenteous picnic out the back, but now it was bleak mid-winter and, if the frosty wind didn't quite make moan, the zero mercury still offered naught for the comfort.

Folk arrived with rugs and hot water bottles, readers wore gloves and everyone wore smiles.

Canon Rachel Stowe, retired to East Cowton from Hertfordshire, bade us all a warm welcome - "in spirit, at least" - and offered a "blanket thanks" to all who'd made the service possible.

The Northern Echo, she added, might be about to offer them their 15 minutes of fame. Mrs Stowe, a Freeman of York and a church social worker before ordination, became the first woman Canon of St Alban's and only the 12th in Britain. St Mary's was wonderful, she said - "you can feel 500 years of prayer in the very stones of the place".

She helps out during pastoral reorganisation east of Richmond. "We love her to bits," said Barbara Ingall.

Since the old harmonium also gets a bit rheumaticky in the cold - "you'd have a heart attack trying to get enough wind into that," said Kathy Jones, the usual organist - they had borrowed an enormous electrical box of tricks owned, engineered and sublimely synchronised by Ken Hewitt.

Thus were our country carols accompanied by cathedral organ or symphony orchestra and to inspiring effect, Mr Hewitt giving it the most energetic what fettle (as they say slightly to the north) on the keyboard.

The carollers' breath wasn't just visible but so dense that the Met Office might have issued a severe weather warning.

That we applauded the choir may not just have been because they deserved approbation, though manifestly they did, but to forestay the first symptoms of frostbite.

Few may even have noticed. Whoever coined the phrase about cold hands and warm heart might have been thinking of South Cowton.

The readings were familiar, the carols - Joy to the World, O Little Town of Bethlehem, While Shepherds Watched sung to the traditional tune and not on Ilkley Moor - might have constituted a Christmas top ten.

In a frozen field in the middle of nowhere, that redundant little church may rarely have been so gainfully or so gloriously employed.

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