AQUINQUENNIAL inspection is an ecclesiastical term meaning recurring nightmare. Every five years the architect arrives, pokes about a bit and advises those concerned what must be done to stop the church collapsing in a heap, being condemned by the council, or both.

At the church of St Helen, Auckland, things were even worse than they'd feared. The floor was riddled with damp rot, the heating was beneath the floor and had fatally been affected as a result and the pews were not only set into the floor but, when removed, unable to stand on their own.

It was all rather reminiscent of the Negro spiritual about the thigh bone being connected to the hip bone, or whatever the skeletal sequence. Perhaps they remembered the chorus, too.

It was 1999 when the ground was opened up beneath them. Last Friday evening, the occasion inevitably clouded by the events in America three days earlier, they celebrated the church's wondrous restoration. In 12 months, they had raised £170,000.

"I have to say," admits Fr Robert McTeer, the parish priest, "that that surprised even me."

A list in the order of service of trusts and charities which had helped included £70,000 from the interest on a legacy left for the church fabric by the Nicholson family, local business people.

At the bottom, diplomatically phrased, was an addendum - "The National Lottery or English Heritage were unable to give grant aid to this project" - and Fr McTeer confesses surprise at that, too.

"St Helen's Auckland is a deprived area. I really don't know what you have to do to get money from the Lottery." They got lucky, anyway. "The parishioners have been wonderful. The giving has been really sacrificial, particularly among the pensioners."

The church serves the communities of West Auckland, St Helen's Auckland and Tindale Crescent, in south-west Durham. When the column was a regular there in the 1970s, it was so middle of the Church of England road that you could have painted a white line down it.

Now its worship and practices are Anglo-Catholic, symbolised by opposition to the ordination of women priests, what folk call high church.

Now its high and handsome.

The building, dating partly from the 12th Century, has been completely redecorated with lime wash, the pews have been replaced - the congregation was invited to "buy" one for £500 - there's a new free standing altar and a rood screen at the chancel entrance which came from a redundant church in Craghead, near Stanley.

"We brought it on the back of a lorry," says Fr McTeer who comes from Whickham, nearby, and previously worked for the Co-op. Among his predecessors at St Helen's was a 17th Century priest deprived of his living for selling horoscopes at the altar. They reinstated him later, probably saw it in the stars.

For four months they'd shared with the nearby Roman Catholic church - "marvellously hospitable". Now it was good again to hear the familiar old bell, what young Molesworth used to call a clang-pip bell, and to recognise some friendly old faces. There was Cilla, for donkeys' years a conductress on the Eden bus who used to give sweets to the young 'uns; Sylvia Snowdon, 91, formerly matron of Tindale Crescent hospital; Nellie Bowser - evacuated from London during the war and still possessed of a Bow Bells accent - and Mary Hodgson, who with Nellie helped raise tens of thousands of pounds for the hospital and recently had three weeks as a patient there.

"They looked after me wonderfully," she said and well, indeed, they might.

There was also a chap with his arm in a sling, the result of being attacked by a cantankerous cockerel. "Mind," he said, "it made a lovely Sunday dinner."

The service was led by the Rt Rev Martyn Jarrett, the "flying" Bishop of Beverley, appointed to give alternative episcopal oversight to parishes which reject ordination and attended by a veritable panoply of priests. No matter how many chairs they fetched, still more were needed. Lady Jane Gore-Booth, parish pastoral assistant and articulate opponent of women's ordination, joined others in sitting on the foot of the font. It was so wonderfully full that, were churches to fall within the overcrowding sections of the Offices, Shops and Railway premises Act, there would surely have been a summons from the council next morning.

We squeezed next to John Marshall, genial vicar of the neighbouring parish of St Andrew, Auckland, wearing his suit for the first time in two years. "It seems to have shrunk," he said.

After a silence in which to remember the US victims - "We are united in sadness, sorrow and solidarity," said the bishop - there was so much procession and preparation that the "opening" prayer came after 25 minutes.

Altar, church and congregation were blessed, censed, sprinkled with water. The bishop in his homily again referred to events in America. "Let the world do what it may, we know that our God is with us, eternally and for ever." There were prayers for the Pope but none, specifically, for the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Musically magnificent - a Schubert mass setting sung by Musica Johannis from Newcastle - the service lasted two hours. That there seemed a rush for the door at the end was purely, of course, because a 15 round bun fight awaited in the parish centre round the corner.

The Bishop of Beverley beamed, the priests beneath their birettas beamed, the good folk of St Helen's had good reason to enjoy their supper and when next the recurring nightmare returns, they know they can sleep thankfully in their beds.