THE nose to this week's column comes as a bargain offer. You can have two for the price of one. You say you don't want two? That you would sooner have one at half-price? Can't be done, but tell you what - take them both, choose between them in the comfort of your own home and, provided the reject is returned in good condition, there will be no extra charge for this unique service.

First, there's the one about the North Yorkshire village which ought to offer its electoral system to the Americans to replace the automated voting that has caused the spat in Florida.

The convenor writes the names of six respectable candidates (that might be a problem at the top of the Republican and Democratic parties, but something could be worked out) on pieces of paper which are then coated in wax and submerged in water. He then dips in to make a random choice.

Then there's the one about the same village, as a place where history bids the locals not to confuse Elizabeth Hurley with Salome of the Seven Veils; or rather, dcollet with decollate.

An important event in the village year takes place on the day the parish church marks the decollation of its patron saint - nothing to do with the wearing of a daringly low-cut neckline, but with a beheading. Salome, as a reward for her dancing before Herod, was granted her request of being served John the Baptist's head on a platter.

Special offer ends here. Pick and mix the intro of your choice with what follows.

The place is Kirby Hill, where a few dozen souls live in what Pevsner describes as "a perfect and exceptional village" perched on a ridge west of Richmond.

It benefits from a 450-year-old charity whose trustees are still chosen in the original and singular fashion on August 29, the feast day of the Decollation of St John: a jar of water containing the names of unsuccessful candidates is locked away in a cupboard, ready for a re-draw should a vacancy occur during the period of office.

The cupboard is a handsome one provided by the man, the Rev John Dakyn, who founded the charity in May 1556, at a time when he was also busy with something rather less palatable.

It was early days in the case of two obstinate Protestants, brothers who were in defiance of the Catholic Bloody Mary, one of whom Dakyn was to pursue to a heretic's pyre - as described here last week.

Dakyn lived in interesting times. At one stage he seemed likely to be executed himself. He was involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the religious insurrection of 1536 in the moorland area west of Masham in reaction to Henry VIII's assault on the monasteries.

His life was spared after it was accepted that he had been acting under coercion; the Privy Council was also convinced by his plea that the people of Richmond accepted royal supremacy.

As he put it when he decided to set up the charity for the parish of Kirkby Ravensworth, he had "been long and often tossed hither and thither on the waves of this uncertain life, observing there is nothing stable in its vanities ..."

He wished "to lament sincerely my errors, ignorances and most grievous sins, wishing now at last to draw tight the lax reins of my youth" - and with an abrupt change of metaphor - "put in to the harbour of life eternal".

He attempted to make amends by bequeathing his worldly goods, plus substantial assets placed in his care under the will of his former chief, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, to a trust which would benefit both young and old. It would provide a free school hard by the church at Kirby Hill and, across the green from it, a hospital (almshouse) for the elderly poor.

The almshouse still operates, these days as six modern self-contained flats within the ancient walls, and is now called Dakyn House in a bid to shake off the unfashionable connotations of "charity" and "alms". Even so, in a Kirkby Ravensworth parish where expansion since Dakyn's time, if any, is these days usually in the shape of up-at-heel incomers, it is not always easy to fill a vacancy.

The 16th-century school building, with additions, also remains. But it too is changed inside. In 1973 it was leased for 50 years to the Landmark Trust which runs part of it as a holiday cottage, one of the organisation's 170 properties, usually of both historic and architectural importance, which had been in urgent need of restoration.

For £527 a week in midsummer and £132 for four days in mid-winter, four people can stay there in considerable comfort and reflect on the spartan conditions for early pupils, including the Matthew Hutton who became an 18th-century Archbishop of York and a confidante of George II; another Hutton from the same family also became an archbishop, but the pillar that stands on a hilltop above their ancestral home at Marske-in-Swaledale is to army captain Matthew Hutton, who died just before Waterloo.

Originally, the clergymen who held the £9 a year post as schoolmaster lived in lodgings on the first floor above the single classroom; in age or infirmity they could retire to the vicarage at East Cowton; two farms it owned around that village were not sold by the trust until 1960 when, for £50, it also disposed of fishing rights on the Swale.

Masters were to educate boys "in virtue, piety, civility and good morals" by using such as Aesop's Fables and the works of Cato and Virgil.

The first of them, at least, being appointed during Mary I's zealous Catholicism, swore not to corrupt pupils by reading them anything "contrary to the determination of the universal or Catholic Church".

In 1706, an adjoining two-storey cottage was built for the master. An inscription on an outside wall, Mox Nox, may sound like a premonition of nuclear power stations to come, but it is actually carved on a sundial and means: "It will soon be night."

The North Riding Directory of 1851 says the school "is free to all boys of the parish and neighbourhood who are eight years of age and able to read. They are instructed gratuitously in English, Writing and Arithmetic, and those who desire it are likewise taught Latin and Greek."

It says there were 30 to 40 pupils and there was now also an usher whose £53 13s 6d a year was a third of the master's £164.

Remarkably, the school did not close until 1957; I wonder whether its last set of desks survive anywhere; they had been bought second-hand from its just-junior rival, Scorton grammar school, and bore the scratched initials, wit and wisdom of generations of boys at both places.

The first non-priest master at Kirby Hill was the strict Mr J J Jones, appointed in the 1930s when there were still up to 30 boys aged from ten to 18. Among the latter was Mr Tommy Astwood, who still lives at nearby Whashton where he was born in 1920 and who was a centre of attraction when hundreds of visitors came to the old school on Landmark's recent open day.

He remembers it all so well. One of his contemporaries would arrive on horseback; Jones taught three age groups in the same room, with the youngest boys in the first of three rows; the same grandfather clock ticks in what is now a sitting room with an open fire; the school bell still hangs outside; and there remains the master's venerable high chair.

Old history textbooks augment the holiday reading of today's guests.

Mr Astwood left school at 14, as did most of the Kirby Hill boys. Although his life has included gamekeeping on the Cradock estate, wartime RAF and finally pest control, he eventually found himself back at his alma mater - he acted as a kind of clerk of works during the conversion job by Landmark.

And for 26 years since then his wife, Katharine, has been Landmark's housekeeper there, helped by their daughter, Mrs Christine Nesham