Before technology transformed us, The Northern Echo - like most other newspapers - employed a scissor squad, sedulously to cut and paste everything onto a second bit of paper and to file appropriately. These days you just press Button B.

Those faded photographs and khaki cuttings chiefly comprise a now-dusty library. In most places it would be in the bowels of the building, here it's in the lap of the gods.

One section is labelled "North-East places." There's Hutton Mulgrave and Hutton Magna, Hutton Conyers and Hutton Cranswick. Huttons Henry, Buscel and Ambo. Hutton Sir Leonard is under "Personalities" and, being dead, has been promoted to glory, or at least to the top shelf.

On Hutton Bonville, however, there is not so much as a paragraph, not even a shaggy dog story.

It's as though it never existed, or if it did, only in the pages of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (In which case, of course, it would have been Hutton Bourneville.)

Yet it's still signed off the road from Darlington to Northallerton, closer to Northallerton, and was comprehensively chronicled in Bulmer's Historical Directory of North Yorkshire, published in 1890.

In those days Hutton Bonville had 1,520 acres, 114 people and a rateable value of £3589, "half of which the assessed value of the North Eastern Co's line which passes through the parish."

The hall and much of the surrounding land had long been in the hands of the Conyers family, they who went about slaying wyverns and worms and sundry other beasts, until (says Bulmer) the family estates were "squandered by alienation and dissipation."

The "barren" title passed to Thomas Conyers who at the time was a pauper in Chester-le-Street workhouse. History, alas, fails to record his reaction.

The parish also had a school and Wesleyan chapel at Lovesome Hill, two miles distant, and in Hutton Bonville itself the Anglican church of St Lawrence - "a plain stone structure consisting of nave, chancel and north aisle with campanile above the west gable".

Turn off at that solitary sign, head westwards for a mile and a half or so, cross the East Coast main line and St Lawrence's still stands where the road ends, in almost total isolation. Evensong was to be said last Sunday at 2.30pm.

Alan Glasby, team rector of the East Richmond group of 14 village churches - four licensed clergy, 5,500 people - arrives at 2.15pm. He's first, the tranquillity broken only by the disconsonant roar of trains on the North Eastern Co's line.

At 2.25pm he spots another car coming across the fields - if not the cavalry, nor yet the Children of Israel, then welcome because its occupants will constitute the congregation in its entirety. Frank and Olive Hugill, the regulars, are away.

Mr Glasby, a good chap, also spots a question heading towards him from yet further afield, as affectionate as it is ineluctable. A favourite line at football dinners, delivered by overpaid ex-professionals singing for their supper, is that Mr Tommy Smith (or Mr Billy Bremner, or whoever) was known as Exocet because you could see him coming but couldn't do a thing about it.

Thus in the peaceful midst of North Yorkshire's arable flatlands, with just two houses and rather more cows for near neighbours, how may the continued existence of St Lawrence's be justified?

First, however, he has a service to hold. Evensong abandoned, the bell tolled untelling, we gather in a small corner of the church beneath a tablet citing Micah 6:8, the bit about doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God.

An impromptu, informal service lasts 20 minutes. From where the column is sitting, it's possible to see the holes in the roof.

Di Pownall, the car driver, is a Church of England lay reader from Northallerton, but who was born nearby in Danby Wiske. With her are her grandchildren - Ben, ten, and eight-year-old Lauren.

Lauren says, several times, that she's bored.

Mr Glasby strives valiantly, invites the children to recall something good that happened in the previous week - "I went to watch Spurs," says Ben - and something bad. Lauren says that her sister, who's one, bit her finger.

"Baby sisters can be a pain sometimes," says the rector, kindly.

"Mine's a pain all the time," says Lauren.

An improbable quintet, we sing Colours of Day, Kumbaya and One More Step. Mr Glasby, who clearly knows his music, says that the late Sydney Carter, who wrote One More Step, also wrote Hole in the Ground, made famous by Bernard Cribbins.

He also says that Pete Seeger brought back Kumbaya from Africa (presumably in little boxes).

At the end Ben comes around with the plate, thus more or less fulfilling the scripture that wherever two or three are gathered together, there shall a collection be also.

Lauren says she's always bored and always hungry and, what's more, she hates vegetables.

Her grandmother argues that it's important to remember St Lawrence's past. "People who come here for the first time are quite impressed both by its history and its location. They find peace here."

Mr Glasby says that in his vast, 14 church patch they try to combine mission with "a measure of maintenance."

"There are lovely churches in Thirsk and Northallerton, so it's a very good question to ask why there's one in the corner of a field in Hutton Bonville.

"It does have a heightened sense of history. There's no question mark over it at the moment, nothing on the agenda. What happens to it is up to the people here, not the bishop or the rector."

A week tomorrow, in the parish church at East Cowton, two miles to the north, there's a united service for All Saints Day to which the congregations of all 14 churches have been invited.

They hope for as many as 200. It's from there, with a different view of country church and rural ministry, that we'll report when the column returns in a fortnight