TIME now to give you the answer about why some church clockfaces are blue. We’ve been puzzling this on behalf of Aubrey Clethero, of Shildon, for several weeks.

The answer is that there is no answer. Churches dedicated to St Mary are no more likely to have blue clockfaces than other churches; clocks built by Potts of Leeds – this region’s most famous clockmaker whose founder hailed from Darlington – are also no more likely to be blue than any other clockmaker’s.

So before we truthfully answer “don’t know”, here are a couple of clues:

■ When clocks first replaced sundials on churches at the end of the 18th Century, for reasons of visibility, the dials were either white with black hands or black with gold;

■ White faces can look a little plain, even anaemic.

Black faces can look extremely classy – on the right church. St John the Baptist at Low Dinsdale is a splendid, splendid church – but isn’t there something a little sinister about its black face contrasted with its red Tees sandstone?

■ Blue faces seem to become popular in the second half of the 19th Century (when Potts was in its prime) when the first clocks were wearing out. It could be that churches switched colour to boast that they’d installed a new clock – you wouldn’t want to do all that fundraising only to install something that looked exactly like the old one.

You’d plump for fashionable blue, as at Croft Church, pictured, because you wouldn’t want your new clock to be behind the times.

■ We have yet to hear of a church with an Indian red clockface and gold hands.

However, anyone watching the Open Golf from St Andrews at the weekend would have seen such a specimen on the Royal and Ancient clubhouse overlooking the first tee.