CLAIMS that an opponent may be hit into the next county are inarguable at Barningham: while much of the village cricket ground is in North Yorkshire, one corner’s claimed by Co Durham.

Until they built a new pavilion, indeed, one scorer watched proceedings from the county palatine while, next to him, the other notched in White Rose country.

Barningham’s gloriously in Teesdale, the handsome village itself in Co Durham though subject to a sort of bureaucratic pass the parcel whenever there’s a local government boundary review. The parish church is also within palatinate precincts, though improbably claimed by the Diocese of West Yorkshire and the Dales.

Might not it be supposed that West Yorkshire and the Dales had quite enough churches of their own without pinching them from Durham?

On a fine summer evening, the second team is playing Oxbridge – which should not be supposed some sort of academic amalgam but is, in fact, named after a pub in Stockton. It’s the Darlington and District League B Division Cup semi-final and Barningham quietly fancy their chances.

THE village may most attractively be approached from the west, a fragrant four-miler from the Stang road through the hamlet of Scargill.

The last time we walked that way, a few years back, someone had a Chinese tank on their lawn, or at least parked out the front. We never did discover what it was doing there.

Scargill even has an ancient castle, and just when everyone supposed Scargill Castle to be Barnsley.

At the Barningham end, though not at the other, road signs wordlessly encourage drivers to gan canny – we’re still in Co Durham – in order to preserve the local hedgehogs.

The injunction appears effective, though there are two or three flat rats along the verdant road. When did anyone see a triangular sign urging “Caution: rats”?

Barningham’s chiefly stone built, much of the surrounding land owned by the Milbank family, the cricket field itself leased on a peppercorn for a century.

Sir Antony Milbank, who died last July, was a nationally prominent conservationist and environmentalist who’d once had an authentic looking guillotine made to mark the village’s French weekend.

“I’m not sure what people will think of an aristocrat building a guillotine but they’ll probably suppose it a bit strange,” he said, doubtless with a backward glance to events in France 200 years earlier.

An obituary last year also recalled that, while a young guardsman at St James’s Palace, he’d invited the ample actress Jayne Mansfield to dinner on the more flimsy pretext that the Queen would be there, too.

Sadly, it failed to record what happened next.

THE Milbank Arms, the village pub, is one of only two in Co Durham – the other the incomparable Victoria in Durham City – to feature in the Camra guide to Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs.

It’s little changed since 1860, still hasn’t a bar. Landlord Neil Turner, 83, potters off down to the cellar to deliver a very good pint of Bass.

The nearby bus shelter – Barnard Castle to Richmond, four times a day in each direction – has issues of the local free magazine (“Barningham and Scargill edition”), an unopened copy of that morning’s Daily Telegraph and even a print-out of the newsagent’s round.

Barningham’s most popular paper, it must ruefully be reported, is The Guardian. It sells five.

The former phone box is now renamed The Green Room, a timeless totem to English eccentricity which, for the summer at least, is transformed into a sort of wish-you-were-here time machine with fishing net, cockle shells, bucket and spade and a sign saying “To the beach.”

There’s no longer a telephone, though.

BARNINGHAM Cricket Club was formed in 1896, the seconds now captained by 56-year-old Colin Blackburn, once a familiar Northern League footballer with Shildon, Bishop Auckland and Spennymoor United who had one top division game for Middlesbrough when Northern Irish international Terry Cochrane was injured.

“Away to Nottingham Forest, just after they’d won the European Cup,” he at once recalls. “Kenny Burns scored the only goal after 84 minutes.”

Colin was chiefly responsible for marking Frank Gray and John Robertson. “Robertson looked like a duck but what a footballer. I couldn’t get near him,” he says.

Graham Newton, 49, supposes that their side is typical of most village second teams – “kids and old men like me, nothing in between.”

Oxbridge bat, the pitch gently sloping but in line for honorary membership of the Flat Earth Society compared to those in the Feversham League (on which an annual report in next week’s column.)

The ground’s a few hundred yards east of the village, the county border marked by a 7ft dry stone wall, much of the rest of the boundary by a barbed wire fence. Happily, only sheep wool appears impaled upon it.

The crowd’s about five men, a lady with a cornet – the musical sort – and a dog named Penny. If there are hedgehogs, they’re lying low.

The visitors lose an early wicket but then enjoy an assault by Owen Richardson (73) and Craig Judd (70 not out). One six in particular not only sails into the next county but quite possibly overflies it completely and lands somewhere near Whitley Bay.

A young Barningham fielder proves particularly vigorous in pursuit of lost causes, once-whites grassy green. “Me mam’ll kill me,” he says.

They finish on 163-3 from 20 overs. Though Barningham’s first team had amassed 252 from 20 the evening previously, it’s considered a formidable score.

Quick turn round – it’s getting nippy – and the teams re-enter, greeted by a rather lugubrious and wholly improbable Chariots of Fire on cornet.

Graham says his uncle appeared in the film, one of those in a charabanc owned by Preston’s of Potto as it carried the athletes along Redcar beach. “Penny could have fielded better than I did,” he adds.

COLIN'S run out for a dozen or so, accepting but clearly unhappy. He didn’t learn language like that in the Northern League.

Breath back, he talks of the difficulty of raising teams at village level. They’ve around 45 registered players, only one or two from Barningham itself, but haven’t seen some of them for years.

“When I was young we’d play for the school in the morning and the club in the afternoon, never take a holiday in cricket season because we’d miss a game. These days they always seem to be away – stag dos, birthdays, whatever.

“To stop them walking away you have to keep them involved. Gone are the days when you’d have one chap bowl 20 overs at one end, another 20 at the other and when you’d hardly ever see nine, ten and jack get a bat.

“I still enjoy it, the only thing is that my knees are knackered. I used to really enjoy fielding, chasing around. I can’t now.”

Barningham see nine and 10, finish on 100-8. The lady with the cornet plays Sing Hosanna (to the King of Kings). It’ll be Oxbridge’s first final since the club was formed in 2010.

Up in the Milbank Arms, Neil Turner has lit a warm and welcome fire. The toast is village cricket.