A confusion of Cowtons

South Cowton vanished centuries ago, but its ancient church dedicated to St Mary still stands in the middle of nowhere.

East Cowton remains a thriving village, but its ancient church dedicated to St Mary was demolished decades ago.

There’s a third Cowton – North Cowton – inbetween Darlington and Northallerton, but thankfully it appears to be churchless.

Memories 108 told the story of St Mary’s, South Cowton, three weeks ago, which stands in a muddy field beneath an old castle. It is “a finely-crafted church built in warring times”.

Its partner, St Mary’s, East Cowton, was far from finelycrafted and was forever falling down.

“A rotting barn-like building with a square brick tower sticks out on the skyline like an ugly finger on the approach road to East Cowton,”

begins a report in the Northern Despatch newspaper of November 1966.

East Cowton is rather like Newton Aycliffe in that it was a planned development.

Aycliffe was planned as a newtown in the 1940s; East Cowton was planned in the 12th Century as a new village.

There were to be at least 13 cottages on narrow, parallel strips of land – or tofts. Each cottage faced onto the village’s central road with its toft running behind 400 yards behind it.

Quite why the lord of the manor decided in 1228 to build a church a stiff walk outside his housing estate is unknown. It could be that there was an older place of worship already on the approach road.

The church was rebuilt in the 14th Century when East Cowton was at its most prosperous, and after Henry VIII’s Reformation, the church was given to Kirby Ravensworth Hospital and School on the west of Richmond.

The school, at Kirby Hill, appointed East Cowton’s vicar, usually a retired teacher. It paid him out of the tithes collected from the East Cowton congregation, and used the surplus to support its hospital work.

But because St Mary’s was a stiff walk from their homes, the congregation didn’t treasure the church.

It was in decay in 1629. It was in even greater decay in 1707 – ravaged perhaps by a storm or a fire – so that the medieval nave and tower had to be rebuilt.

But not very well.

According to a dismissive report in 1907, the work was done “by the village mason and the village joiner.

Passers-by have likened it unto a barn or a factory”.

So decayed was it that the villagers abandoned it and, in 1909-10, built a new church, All Saints, in East Cowton.

For 60 years, derelict St Mary’s decayed even further, pigeons, rabbits and vandals doing their worst. When it became a public health matter in the late 1960s, no one spoke up in its defence, and it was demolished in 1968.

Today, the graveyard is one of those lovely countryside curiosities. It is still open, half-a-mile from the nearest habitation, with the old headstones standing like sentries around its edge as a snowcovered path leads between two yew trees to where the porch had stood for centuries.