LANDS isn’t even big enough to have a speed limit, the village nameplate at the bottom of the bank restricted to urging drivers to – you know – gan canny.

Properly there’s High Lands and Low Lands, the former small and the latter much smaller. John Elliott – philanthropist, industrialist and a deputy lieutenant of Durham – insists that when he collected his MBE, the Queen asked where he was from.

“Lands,” said John.

“High Lands or Low Lands?” said Her Majesty.

It’s in the mid-west of the county, edge of Cockfield Fell. The cricket field, strictly speaking, lies between the two villages – no man’s Lands, as it were.

Once, recalls 84-year-old Donald Metcalfe, High Lands had two shops, a Methodist chapel and a village institute with a snooker table so popular that there was a lengthy waiting list for a game.

Now there’s a VR postbox, a small playground, a bus service as infrequent as it is improbable, a wood which Mr Lewis Carroll might have supposed tulgey and a single street which staggers on to 65 and then, done for, retires.

Cricket club chairman Carroll Simpson recalls that they knocked down 20 houses. “They’d built council houses in Evenwood and Cockfield and had to have someone to put in them. You can’t do that in a place like Lands and expect it ever to be the same.”

LAST Saturday they hosted Raby Castle, just a couple of miles distant as a courtly crow might fly, a game potentially crucial to the outcome of the Darlington and District League A division title.

Raby were top, Lands edged to third man after being awarded just two points from a postponed match the previous week. Winners take 20. Two evenings previously, Lands had beaten their neighbours in a cup tie.

In former times, recalls Donald Metcalfe, the field was just rig and furrow – “wicket atop the rig” – play possible only after 14 barrow loads of cow plat (his unhesitating estimate) had been shifted from the square.

Raby Castle, unsurprisingly, has greater pedigree, the field in the shadow of the 14th century fortress that long has been home to the gentry.

Co Durham’s first recorded cricket match was played there in 1751, Duke of Cleveland’s X1-or-so against Duke of Northumberland’s X1-or-so, the attraction not so much the sport as the substantial side stakes but the excitement enough to inspire a Georgian ballad.

Durham City has been dull so long.

No banter at all on show,

But now the rage of all the throng

Is a-cricketing to go.

Yorkshire hosted the return fixture a few days later, across the Tees at Stanwick, and in turn the first recorded match in White Rose country. The Duke of Northumberland, long story, owned that bit of Yorkshire, too.

Back in the 1950s, it’s perhaps apocryphally recalled, the then Lord Barnard declined permission for the cricket club to erect a pavilion. “You can’t afford what I would like,” he said. They have a handsome pavilion now.

The days are long past, of course, when Lands or any other village side could field a team wholly from around the doors – nor has that option ever been open to Raby, not unless the incumbent king of the castle demands annually to open the batting. Noblesse oblige, and all that.

IT'S rained all night, little more clement in the morning. Carroll’s spent much of Friday preparing the ground, spread a big black tarpaulin over the wicket – “we can’t afford covers” – has been joined on Saturday morning by two or three helpers.

The ground’s held on a 999-year lease from local egg dealer Tony Elliott – John’s brother – if not what might be supposed a level playing field then by no means as vertiginous as some. “Tony doesn’t charge us a penny,” says Carroll. “We just have to remember to say thank you every now and then.”

He also recalls that John Elliott, now chairman of Aycliffe-based Ebac, welded his first dehumidifier in a hen hut out the back.

“It was for a chap in Scotland who was so pleased he wanted another ten. John had to think about getting a bigger hen hut.”

LANDS bat, and on what might most kindly be called a sticky wicket. “Low and slow,” says a fielder. His mate supposes it as flat as a witch’s tit, though what is so especially depressed about that particular part of the witchetty anatomy some of us have never really understood.

The crowd’s about five and rising, as the shipping forecast might suppose, with the barometer.

Carroll still finds jobs to be done, particularly keen to biff up the boiler and to show off the pavilion refurbished by Simon Sowerby in the winter. Why does he do it?

“The wife asks me that all the time. These lads don’t know how much it costs, someone just bumped the wall and that cost us £400 alone. I’d love it if someone came forward and let me take a few paces back but it would be terrible if there was no village cricket in somewhere like Lands. Enough teams have gone already. It’s tradition, isn’t it?”

He’s wearing wellies. An inches-deep fielder asks if he might borrow them.

Lands are all out for 92 in the 33rd of 40 permitted overs, three wickets apiece for Goodfellow, Lee and Dent. Carroll’s undismayed. “If we can get four sharp wickets we’ve a chance,” he says.

The tea’s magnificent, press and public allowed copious crumbs from the table once the teams have been sated.

Lands bag three sharp wickets, particularly excited when demon batter Simon Lee is out, caught comfortably, for just two. After six overs, Raby are 12-3. By then the sun’s blessing the battle.

It’s 50-odd before another wicket falls, 68-5 when a ball from Ryan Matthews is played onto the stumps. The bail ponders its next move, shivers a bit, declines to go any further. The incredulous bowler’s down the wicket, supposing that Sir Isaac Newton might have been mistaken all along.

“That bugger must have a tube of glue down his underpants,” someone supposes.

Though Andy Cummings claims two in two balls, though Raby’s eighth wicket falls in the 38th over with the scores level, a single from the next ball ends a wonderful, intensely competitive game of cricket. The applause is mutual.

These are guys who for four-and-a-half hours play without thought – or chance – of remuneration, who pay for their tea, who take their grass-green whites home to the Persil fairy, who never ever swear audibly and who, when the batting side umpire gives an LBW, benefit of the redoubt, take turns to thank him very much.

It looked so plumb, mind, that if he hadn’t given it the redoubt might have been stormed.

Plenty of cricket still to be played, but it goes a long way to determining the destination of the league title. Raby Castle impregnable, but for Lands glory, nonetheless.