Club is Spout of this world (Backtrack)

Derek Rylander, half the crowd, watched with collar upturned and what appeared to be one of the back bedroom curtains over his lap. He wore hiking boots, clutched a bottle of beer and had come all the way from Thornaby.

"I'm the Sid and Doris Bonkers," he said cheerfully, though Doris - that is to say, Mrs Rylander - was at some church do back home. Usually she comes, too.

The quote begged to be recorded, the sky and the scene to be photographed, the occasion to be savoured. The slender television mast high across the moor could never have transmitted anything so improbable, nor so glorious, as cricket at Spout House.

It's in Bilsdale, between Stokesley and Helmsley in North Yorkshire, possibly named after a Scandinavian settler called Bild and more fancifully after William the Conqueror, who happened that way after the Harrying of the North.

The field at the back of the Sun Inn has played cricket since 1850. It slopes like the square on the hypotenuse, the strip now extended southwards to prevent so many shots clattering against William Ainslie's best barn - "You could land a jumbo jet on it," someone said. The sheep had well wintered at short leg

"People complain about sheep shit but they complained even more when it was't cows," said William Ainslie, 77-year-old Sun Inn landlord and for 60 years the cricket club secretary.

"It's t'same for both teams. If a ball landed in cow clap for one, it landed in cow clap for t'other."

The unchanging changing room is a little wooden hut bought second hand 30 years ago from a fertilizer firm down in Thornton Dale, when television made a programme called Cricket at Spout and gave them £110 for their trouble.

When cricketers talk about being back in the hutch, they're probably thinking of Spout House.

They played High Farndale, that happy club's own wicket probably the only flat 22 yards in the daffodil-decked dale. They're not much into level playing fields in the Feversham League.

"It's better than all those flat, boring cricket fields," said Dave Mead, the visiting captain. "It's a lovely little league, just a pity there aren't more teams in it. These places have character."

And characters, he might have said, too.

They also have local rules. A six if it clears the dry stone wall or brains a passing motor cyclist, four if it hits the hen hut "or any other obstacle", four more if its makes contact with Madge Ainslie's clothes rope, from which a limp Black Sheep beer mat hung with tail between its legs.

When they hosted the Lady Feversham Cup final a couple of years back they'd moved the clothes line outside the boundary, on the grounds that it wouldn't do for someone to be garroted in the cup final. There'd even been sight screens, a couple of bed sheets flown over specially from Great Broughton.

The Darlington and Stockton Times once called this ground "unusual". It was a bit like calling Cyril Smith plump.

Now they gathered outside the hut, both the laws of physics and the Safety at Sports Grounds Act suggesting that two teams might not decently be accommodated simultaneously.

The home players pulled the heavy roller, store horse personified. A couple of Farndale's had a fag.

"I just love it, never miss a game," said Andrea Welburn, partner of home skipper Brian Hall and the other half of the crowd. "It's far better than staying at home watching television, isn't it?"

Farndale batted first, Dave Mead - first man down - spoke of the joys of the six-team league which they contest. "The most important thing is just to keep it going, if we're walloped every week then so be it. It's the only outdoor sport left in Farndale, and if we stop it, it'll never start again."

Interrupted, he marched off to arms. "I won't be long," said Dave, and nine voices chorused that he wasn't joking.

He returned two balls later, an unsympathetic young bull watching ruminatively from yon side of the dry stone. "Bullocks and double bullocks," said Dave, or words quite closely to that effect.

Farndale also included Chris Berry, a farming journalist on the Yorkshire Post, who with his 15-year-old son Stuart had driven from Leeds for the heady pleasures of Feversham cricket.

"I once told them to let me know if they were short. I don't think they believed me," he said.

A cold breeze sprang up, the hutch trembled, the bails had to be stuck back on with sheep sh...they had to be stuck on, anyway.

At times the pitch seemed almost to curve, like one of those shots of the earth's surface taken with a posh camera from the moon. From another angle the players appeared cut off at the knee, from another slipping down the side of the precipice like half-crown fridge magnets.

Even the two wonky benches seemed contoured commensurately with the pitch, like one of those House of Fun emporia at Whitley Bay Spanish City.

Chris was out for three soon afterwards. "I can't believe I played that shot," he said, immortally. "If I'd hit it, it would have been all right."

Spout House include Northern Echo columnist Harry Mead, 68, baggy blue cap pulled around his ears, whites immaculately pressed into service.

He'd vowed to pack up after a bit of a bad do last year, but - begged to turn out - had hit the winning four, modestly never mentioning it, in a cup match at Hutton Rudby four days earlier.

"I'd forgotten what it was like to score a four," said Harry.

Sadly missing from the Spout outfield was Rachel Godsthalk, an artificial inseminator who lives 50 miles away at Greta Bridge, near Barnard Castle. "She'd come one Sunday to serve one of the cows," recalled Brian Hall.

"My father told her she'd never got the cow in calf in that sort of a rush and she explained that she was playing cricket in Newcastle. He said she might as well play for us as well."

What's she like? "Nice forward defence," said Harry.

High Farndale are 40 all out, top scorer six. Most are in farming, their shots agricultural, too. "It shouldn't be hard, we just make it hard," says Chris Berry.

James Allison takes 3-3, Barry Wheldon 3-7, Craig Thompson 3-12. There's no tea interval, no tea. Not even time for a tab.

"This end's all right, yon's a bit sticky," says Brian.

The visitors' bowling isn't helped by a succession of wides, akimbo umpires in danger of vertical take-off across Bilsdale East Moor.

Harry's standing at one end - "For the first time in living memory the counters don't fall through holes in the coat pockets," he says - while star Farndale batsman Kevin Wilson is officiating, injured, at the other.

Kevin, whom on an earlier visit we'd compared to Giant Haystacks, is the only man in memory to have hit a six clean over the Sun Inn and into the car park, rewarded with a pint from William and a request not to do it again.

He's lost both weight and hair, now more closely resembling a Scandinavian settler called Bild. "I'm management now," he says, fingering the umpire's coat. "I have to look the part."

Spout House win by seven wickets, warm smiles and genuine applause at the end. Before they can have a pint, the home team have the pitch to roll again. "It's the flattest sheep shit in the land," someone says.

William Ainslie's family have run that joyous little bar since 1823, his father - who died in 1956, aged 81 - commemorated on a stone by the top wall. In front of the house, another memorial salutes Bobby Dowson, wicket-keeper and hunt whipper-in for many nineteenth century years.

Local legend has it that, for reasons unexplained, the vicar refused to have it in the churchyard.

William explains that in the winter he puts a padlock round the doors of the hutch, to stop the wind - not any thieves - from getting in. "Mind," he says, "wind's still tried a time or two."

Derek Rylander, Sid and Doris Bonkers, is sipping a Coke. He'd accidentally discovered Spout House cricket ten years ago, when camping in the area with his wife, and had never previously seen a match.

"I still don't understand it, still don't know the rules, sometimes can hardly see the ball," he says. "It's exactly the way I like it. To me, Spout House are the best cricket team in the world."

BACKTRACK BRIEFS . . .

Tuesday's column sought the identity of the only Englishman - other than Hetton-le-Hole born Allan Ball, Queen of the South's record breaking goalkeeper - to have played football for the Scottish League.

The answer was meant to be Joe Baker, Hibs and Arsenal, though Hails of Hartlepool - a man of considerable knowledge and high-powered friends - insists it was Jackie Hather (pronounced as in lather.)

Gordon Hodgson in Bishop Auckland also believes that South Shields born Stan Mortenson played for the Scottish League during the war.

Left wing legend Jack Hather was born in Annfield Plain, brought up in a Horden colliery terrace, signed for Aberdeen from Annfield Plain, married an Aberdonian, spent 12 years with the Dons and became known to his father-in-law as the Durham Heelander.

Ron Hails worked under him 35 years ago, at GEC in Hartlepool, recalls watching the Durham Heelander play for Blackhall, ten bob a week, at the end of his career.

Ron asked him if it were worth it. "I AM a pro," said Jack - and a true pro at that, adds his mate.

He's mistaken, however, in supposing that Jackie represented the Scottish league. We'd asked Reta, his widow, six years ago. "It was talked about," she said. "Unfortunately he was English and it just didn't happen."

It was foolhardy, if not heretical, to suppose in the same column that Queen of the South was the only football team mentioned in the Bible.

Chapter and verse, John Briggs in Darlington finds "arsenal" in Jeremiah 50, "a poor man's field" in Proverbs 13, "bury" in Genesis 23 and "reading" - lower case also - in the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

Tuesday's column, yet again, supposed that the award for the Northern League's fastest player of the 1960s would be between George Brown and Dave Rutherford, both England amateur internationals. Former Crook Town full back Tony Butterfield disagrees.

"I've chased hundreds of forwards and the quickest of them all was Stanley United outside left Jimmy Connor," says Tony, no slouch himself. "Jimmy was like greased lightning."

and finally . . .back to Gordon Hodgson in Bishop Auckland, who invites readers to name the first two Football League (as was) clubs officially to ground share.

Fair shares for all, the column returns on Tuesday.