A little church in a remote moorland parish is the backdrop for a service bringing together all the magic and joy of Christmas.

THE road is dark and lonely, the air clear and cold. The petrol gauge reads below empty and thus reads like a horror story. Signs as we climb towards Chop Gate warn of "Deer" and "Ice" and "Flood".

It's 5.15pm and the thermometer sulks, nithered, in much the same parlous position as the petrol gauge. The lady driver is becoming fraught, and fraughter than she oughter. There could almost be a Christmas allegory coming on.

If Chop Gate's remote, and goodness knows it is, then St Hilda's church is removed yet further from the village and is, in that sense, like a Victorian railway station, built miles from the places from which shamelessly they stole their name.

The church is approached through a farmyard, the River Seth somewhere in the vicinity. When finally we park, it's on a verge which sends the back wheels spinning and does little more for the sense of optimism."I'd love to see this church in daylight," says the lady driver adding that the way things are going, we'll probably get the chance.

Chop Gate's in Bilsdale, a ten-mile ribbon of the North York Moors roughly between Stokesley and Helmsley and better known - better known hereabouts, anyway - for the gravity defying cricket field at Spout House where 1-8 isn't the bowling figures but the gradient down to third man.

Just one other spectator shared our visit last summer. "I'm the Sid and Doris Bonkers," he said. Since the Sun Inn sits, unchanging, at deep long leg, it is where paradise may be found.

Once Bilsdale had jet mining, too. Chop Gate - said locally to have been pronounced "Chopyat", though the suggestion is frowned upon by the incomparable Mr Harry Mead, venerable beady of the North York Moors - had three pubs, shop, post office, petrol pump and village school.

Now only the Buck Inn (where until quite recently a Lockheed Lightning sat in the garden) and the Bilsdale Midcable primary remain. The school has but 13 pupils, which it's to be hoped won't prove unlucky when next the number crunchers get nervous.

The fascinating old church, sometimes known as Bilsdale Priory, is well filled for the carols and Christingle service, and not least because the magnificent Bilsdale Silver Band all but overflows the chancel.

Their opening voluntary is described on the order of service as an "introit". It includes Walking in a Winter Wonderland and All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth. Max Bygraves wasn't it? Most join quietly in.

Built by "William the Noble" and always dedicated to Hilda, a church has stood there since at least the early 12th century, the original building demolished when the Earl of Feversham paid for the present St Hilda's in 1851.

The original font, rescued from the churchyard, is in the porch. A 700-year-old bell calls Bilsdale to worship. Alongside the altar are commandment boards, on the wall a charming painting of the 1948 Sunday School by Edward Monford, vicar at the time.

Though its origins are ancient, the technology's modern. There's a DVD of church history and a website, www.sthildabilsdale.co.uk

These days the vicar's Anne Heading, who lives down in Ingleby Greenhow - sub-tropical, by comparison - and whose four parishes also embrace Kildale and Westerdale.

"She's amazing, never off the roads, I don't know how she does it," says Carol McGee, one of the churchwardens.

"Wonderful girl, great to have her here," says Jeffrey Richardson, the other warden.

The service includes a short dramatisation of the nativity scene in which the inn is identified as the Kings Head, the landlord as David Davidson and Christmas Day as a Friday. Mr Davidson's not best pleased with the Archangel Gabriel. "I've had to tell you to turn the music down," he says.

At St Hilda's the music's altogether more harmonious, a former vicar said to have remarked that the acoustics were so good that the singing congregation felt they were saints in heaven.

Save for the fractious little lad who seems in danger of only a skelped backside for Christmas, the bairns are twinkle-twinkling, mums treasuring their every trebled chance.

Anne also asks them what they get if they take "Christ" out of Christmas, the answer - of course - being "M and S". It's memorable if not necessarily original, but she feels the need for qualification.

"I'm sure they're very good, but they don't bring peace to our hearts."

The Christingle, as we have previously explained, is a symbolic representation consisting of an orange encircled in red ribbon into which is stuck a candle to represent the Light of the World and four cocktail sticks bearing dolly mixtures and whatnot, the fruits of the earth.

Unfortunately at St Hilda's, the Christingles are only given to the bairns - the ecclesiastical term is a swizz - meaning that there's no chance of keeping the lady driver sweet with a couple of buckshee jelly babies.

Still, all the offers of tractors and things - for they are very good folk up here - prove unnecessary.

The car spins first time out of the mud and, following four stars, finds last-gasp room at the Tesco filling station in Middlesbrough.

As winter fuel goes, it couldn't be more welcome, and it ends a lovely evening. Merry Christmas.