NORTH Cowton village green is not exactly Newcastle Town Moor, nor the fair which annually encamps upon it a prize every time rival to the Hoppings. The fair and North Cowton green seem made for one another, nonetheless - made to measure, it might almost be said, so closely does one configure the other and so warmly are the show folk welcomed.

"It's the first date that goes in our diaries," said Billy Smith, an annual arrival since 1969 and so familiar that every year there's a lady who provides him with the pick of her rhubarb patch. Billy, it's whispered, believes 2001 not to be a vintage year for rhubarb.

North Cowton is between Darlington and Northallerton, neither a large village nor an expansive green. For 50 years, the fairground has been part of the annual sports weekend, as traditional as the Saturday night downpour, and in half a century all that seems to have changed is the cost of it.

You can still knock over treacle tins, only now it's three mops for 50p, still hook a duck but what was a tanner has with time's passage become £1. Sub-titled "Our Business is Your Pleasure" there's a ride called New Music Express - Abba may personify new music hereabouts - a hot dog stall over which the flag of St George flies patriotically and an elderly hydraulic device, in which g-force may strictly be lower case.

"This ride is fun but you have to hold on," warns a notice, life's allegory in ten words.

Around it a few old fashioned caravans are coralled - "It's Smith's on tour"; "Barry's Super Bob" - across the road stands the humble but attractive church of St Luke, which replaced a tin church in the 1960s.

Shirley Griffiths became Vicar of the Cowtons in 1995, went to welcome the annual visitors, suggested there might be an open-air fairground service and may have been surprised at the enthusiasm with which the idea was received.

"People don't have to come into church," she explains. "They can see it, take part in it, without having to step over the threshold. Once you're inside a church you feel that you can't easily leave. They don't have that problem here. They have been very accommodating to us." It began three years ago. On Sunday, proceedings slightly delayed so that the annual rounders match might be completed, 100 people congregated around the steps of the New Music Express, the biggest gathering yet.

As usually in the Cowtons, the organisation was ecumenical. Margaret Smith, the Methodist minister for those parts, had braved a squally weekend without an umbrella. "You're taking a chance, aren't you?" someone said. "My trust is in the Lord," said Margaret, smiling, and it wasn't to be misplaced.

It was Trinity Sunday, for which the liturgical colour is green and North Cowton a sort of Trinitarian tapestry beneath the trees. Shirley - "you know I'm a great believer in visual aids" - had bought 75 green ribbons attached to a card, which could be trisected whilst retaining the same base.

The Children's Club essayed a similar explanation through the medium of ice, water and steam and may have made a better fist of the Trinity than several centuries of scholarship.

The hymns, whilst vigorous and familiar, resisted the temptation to follow a fairground theme - which might, in any case, have proved quite difficult.

A Great and Mighty Wonder, that B-list Christmas carol, might apply more fittingly to Blackpool Pleasure Beach than to North Cowton green; Who Is He in Yonder Stall might also have been inappropriate, since everyone knew it was Billy Smith hooking ducks.

The reading, however, missed a chance of supreme symbolism. It was the third chapter of Ecclesiastes - "To everything there is a season" - the scripture that was turned into a 1960s hit for The Byrds, a group of electronic Americans, and for Mary Hopkin, a winsome wench from Wales.

It was called Turn, Turn, Turn and might have been written for modern amusements everywhere.

Another of Sunday's hymns had been adopted for the occasion - Praise him in North Cowton, Praise him in the fairground - though we ended a splendid service with Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven, accompanied on the keyboard by Mr Ken Hewitt and, by the reverberating sound of it, the entire Northern Philarmonic Orchestra.

Afterwards, there were refreshments in the church, proceeds to the new village hall fund, though the show folk were busy elsewhere. Already the New Music Express was rushing into action, the plastic ducks circumlocuting at a more leisurely pace, the shooting saloon going with a bang.

"We mightn't seem to join in much but we really enjoy it," said Billy Smith. "They mightn't go to church very often, but they know who God is."

The fair and Shirley Griffiths both fully intend to be back next year: What goes around comes around as, if not quite in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, they undoubtedly say in North Cowton.

Published: Saturday, June 16, 2001