ROSEDALE Abbey’s at the verdant heart of the North Yorkshire moors, a century ago a teeming mining village and now a tranquil – and, it’s rumoured, pretty expensive – haven-in-a-hollow.

“It’s hard to imagine,” says the community website, “that between 1850-1920 Rosedale was a bustling, sooty and noisy hive of industrial activity.”

Strictly there never was an abbey, though a small group of Cistercian nuns occupied the village priory for 350 years until King Henry got heretical hands on it.

The River Seven, on no account to be confused with its homophonic half-sister – one’s 220 miles, the other barely 15 – meanders nearby. The green hairstreak butterfly flutters undisturbed.

High quality magnetic ironstone had been discovered in the 1850s, the population swiftly rising from 500 to 3,000, hastily constructed railways transporting treasure to the Cleveland plain. In the Coach House Inn, a potted village history talks of long rows of minors’ cottages without addressing where their elders and betters might have lived.

On a notice board, the Manor of Spaunton decrees that it is illegal to turn rams on common land, or to suffer them to remain there, between August 25-November 25.

Legal proceedings, it adds, may be taken against any persons so turning rams on.

Another notice appeals for donations to a food bank – including cat food – though the beneficiaries are unlikely to be in Rosedale Abbey.

The late-May air is filled with the scent of hawthorn and of lilac, and if Rosedale by any other name might smell just as sweet, last Friday evening there’s a blessed bonus: after a gap of almost 40 years, village cricket’s back.

The fish and chip van’s due, an’ all.

THE great revival notwithstanding, Rosedale may best be known to sportsmen for Chimney Bank, rising vertiginously on the road to Hutton-le-Hole and beloved of cycling event organisers with a particularly sadistic streak.

Foe four-fifths of a mile it climbs up to one-in-three, reckoned England’s second steepest public road with Hardknott Pass, in the Lake District and probably even hairier coming down.

In 1987 it was the course for the National Hill Climbing Championship, Stockton Wheeler Paul Curran – a double gold medallist at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh a year earlier – narrowly beating the young Chris Boardman.

Uphill all the way, he was on top by a fifth of a second.

COMPETITIVE cricket had last been played at Rosedale Abbey in the early 1980s. “It was a bit of a surprise when they rang,” says Feversham League secretary Charles Allenby, a bit unsurprisingly.

The league, to which the column for more than a quarter of a century has annually made pilgrimage, was down to just three teams – Slingsby, Spout House, High Farndale. There and in many other places, village cricket was short running, the wicket decidedly sticky.

Watched by scores of villagers, Rosedale had played their first game the week previously. “There was a ground inspector from Headingley and another from Harrogate,” says league chairman Dave Westhead.

Really? “That’s where they said they from,” says Dave.

Scenically set, the pitch overlaps the village football field and, like much else in the Feversham, would be unlikely to gain membership of the Flat Earth Society.

Only Slingsby’s on the level. “I’m surprised they ever got in,” says Alastair Wilkinson, one of the men behind the Rosedale revival.

Little flags line the boundary, a path of pebbles marks a drainage trench, tarpaulins cover the wicket. In the Feversham, all that usually covers the wicket is sheep muck.

A subsequent circumnavigation reveals that if the covers didn’t exactly fall off the back of a lorry, they may until recently have sheeted one.

The pavilion may not reasonably be described as commodious, but compared to one or two others in the Feversham it’s the Long Room at Lord’s. Next to it, a sign identifies the Dave Sellor East Stand, better known as a dugout.

Most of the team also play village football, decided in the winter that it was time to become all-rounders. “We never really thought it would happen but the response from the village and from the league has been tremendous,” says Alastair. “Every single person we asked to help has done so.”

A winter’s night fund raising event in the Coach House topped £900 for equipment. “I was listening to Geoffrey Boycott on Test Match Special going on about the state village cricket was in,” says club secretary Billy Sullivan. “He should get himself down here.”

THEY'RE playing High Farndale, the two grounds separated by about five miles as a determined moor hen might migrate but around 20 by the nearest rolling road. The plan is that Farndale will be augmented – as they had been this time last year – by the column’s elder son, he of Richmond Mavericks.

In the morning he reports sick, unable to get out of bed. By 2pm he has taken up his bed and walked, or at least stumbled, to the car. Three of us head across the moors from Castleton in visibility no more than ten yards.

“It’s like Five Go to Smugglers’ Top”, the boys recall, astonishingly.

“If you reach the Lion Inn at Blakey you’ve gone a mile past the turn,” I tell them. We reach the Lion Inn at Blakey, the road down to Rosedale utterly obliterated in the gloom.

It’s much brighter down the bottom, though not what you’d call sun-kissed, in the Coach House by half past five. The elder bairn joins a rich seam of cricketers – most memorably the late and lamented Graham Smith, of Bishop Auckland and Durham – who believed in a little pre-match lubrication.

Messrs Boots, indeed, may offer little guaranteed more swiftly to lift the spirits if, not necessarily, the batting average.

The village is again out in force, and not just for the peripatetic chip van. The skipper’s mum has baked some splendid coffee cakes; someone else bears boxes of Bud.

The younger bairn, not considered for selection, returns with about six stones of chips, eaten with an orange plastic fork despite God making fingers expressly for that purpose. He has been in London too long.

Rosedale bat, reach 94-7 (approximately) from their 16 overs, the recent invalid’s single over proving expensive but yielding a catch in the deep at its conclusion.

Farndale rarely look like overtaking it, despite Nathan Blacklock’s plucky 30, ended by a magnificent catch. “That’s the first thing he’s caught since that trout in 2010,” says a team-mate.

The spirit, the sportsmanship and the atmosphere are fantastic, the Rosedale boys so well brought up that they even say “Pardon me” when they belch.

It’s another Feversham Friday, and though the homeward journey’s every bit as opaque, there are times when it seems that there’s nothing better on earth.