It may have taken time, but the unveiling of a "Millennium wall hanging" at St Oswald's church in Hauxwell was a fitting tribute to a tradition.

THINK Hauxwell and you think Hannah, she for whom it was too long a winter. The library also has cuttings on Eric Hauxwell, a Catterick dentist who opened wine shops - filling a hole in the market, perhaps - and Arthur Hauxwell from Hartlepool, who walked from Lands End to John o' Groats, or possibly vice versa.

Hauxwell village may be less known than any of them, a dot of a place roughly between Catterick Garrison and the Wensleydale foothills in what the military might term no man's land.

We approached past Catterick Sunday market and through the ever-burgeoning Garrison, following a car which, inexplicably, bore a symbol of Don Quixote on his clapped out horse.

The lady of this house fell unsuccessfully to trying to recall the nag's name. Not very quixotic, anyway.

The village huddles on a hillside, the early-Norman St Oswald's church - restored in 1962, electricity switched on 12 years after that - now almost half a mile distant after an early 17th century plague compelled the destruction of many nearer houses.

The drive was guarded by two monumental flying things - Dalton dragons, apparently - the car park had a steward on crowd control. A jolly refreshment tent stood outside the church.

Normally the congregation might struggle to reach 20. Last Sunday both church and car park overflowed. "Not squashed," someone said, "just cosy."

It was the dedication of St Oswald's "Millennium wall hanging" by the Rt Rev John Packer, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds - a very nice chap who seems determined to visit every nook and cranny of his four winds diocese.

Did he, we wondered, tick off all the churches as if in some ecclesiastical Ian Allan Locospotters' Guide? "I never was much of a train spotter," said the bishop, sagely.

The intricate tapestry was the idea of farmer's wife Carol Pounder, circa 1999. She'd hoped, stitch in time, that it might be completed the following year. Some things take a little longer.

"We were struggling to keep the church open and to raise funds and I wanted to do something," she said. "If the church closed, we'd have something to tell its story. It's a wonderful place, an awful lot of history behind it."

Was St Oswald's really in danger of closing, then? "It's very well supported. Everyone who knows it thinks it's a lovely little church, but there are so few people in the neighbourhood.

"Every year you wonder if it's the last one, but people are still good to it. It's still here, anyway."

She'd put the idea to her friend Annie McDonald, an expert embroiderer from Richmond. A team was assembled using many different techniques. The wall hanging, several times bigger than they'd at first imagined, depicts every century in St Oswald's history.

The leaflet said 1,300 years. Bishop John talked of 1,400. Pretty old, anyway. "Until a few days ago even I hadn't seen it completed, not fully laid out," said Annie. "When it happened I still remember thinking 'Oh gosh'. It's really wonderful."

The bishop talked of a "splendid day of celebration", preached on forgiveness. "Failure to forgive was one of the few things which made Jesus thoroughly angry in the New Testament story.

"He was shattered when his disciples failed to forgive others. Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian gospel."

Eyes closed, though not (of course) sleeping, he sounded remarkably like an epsicopal William Hague. We asked him about that, too. Though born in Lancashire, Bishop John had been Vicar of Wath-on-Dearne in south Yorkshire at the same time as Hague was a 16-year-old Wath schoolboy improbably enthusing the Conservative party conference.

Who'd been infected - inflected, perhaps - by whom? "I don't think I should answer that question," said the bishop, genially.

It was principally a 1662 Prayer Book holy communion service - good old hymns like The King of Love and Praise My Soul the King of Heaven. A weekend long flower festival by the ladies of Bainbridge Flower Club coincided; a public hanging faultlessly executed.

Carol Pounder was delighted. "I don't know how many times things have been on and off that hanging, how many knots have been stitched into that beech tree or how many times I've wondered about me and my big mouth.

"People have been amazing. I still have my friends, but any more ideas like that and I think I've probably had it."

A nurse in the Nightingale mould

THE pioneering nurse known simply as Sister Dora symbolically represents the 19th century on Hauxwell's wall hanging. It can only hint at the story of the first uncrowned woman in England to have a statue erected in her honour.

Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison was the 11th of 12 children born to the Rev Mark Pattison, Hauxwell's rector, and his wife Mary. Their father was deranged, their existence fearful, the rectory almost literally a madhouse.

Pattison was a Protestant evangelical, a man who could smell popery in a pigsty and who suspected his entire family of collusion with Rome. "Will you join the Papists in the drawing room or the poor, solitary, persecuted Protestant in here?" he would demand of visitors to his home.

"The family lived in an atmosphere charged with oppression and paranoia from which they had little relief," writes Dr Judith Gowland in a short biography of Sister Dora.

"It must be confessed that as a husband and parish priest (Mark Pattison) was ultimately a failure," admits a history of St Oswald's.

"He suffered from depression which often showed itself in aggression, particularly towards the family," the Bishop told Hauxwell's congregation on Sunday.

Dorothy endured it until she was almost 30, briefly became a teacher in Buckinghamshire and then joined the Christ Church Sisterhood, at Redcar, in helping establish North Ormesby Hospital to look after victims of Middlesbrough's industrial awakening. It was in Walsall, however, that she became a part of folklore. Sunday's photographer was from that way himself. "You can't live in Walsall and not know the Sister Dora story," he said.

The Walsall hospital she helped found also cared chiefly for industrial accident victims, and for smallpox cases. Dora's care, courage and endurance became legendary.

"The idea that there should be hospital nursing available to the rising populations of the industrial revolution when, through Florence Nightingale, it was barely available to the armed forces was something of a novelty," writes Dr Gowland.

She died from breast cancer, aged just 46, thousands thronging her funeral. The Daily Telegraph expressed no surprise that the first public statue to an uncrowned Englishwoman should, in 1886, have been erected in "dingy" Walsall.

"What Florence Nightingale did for military nursing," it added, "Dorothy Pattison accomplished in the sphere of civic duty."