Turning church pews into bunk beds is just the start of giving a 140-year-old redundant church a new lease of life as an 18-bed visitor hostel.

Residents in Hudswell hope the conversion of Grade II-listed Saint Michael and All Angels church, will also help keep their village viable. A grant of £50,000 from the Yorkshire Dales National Park authority’s sustainable development fund will start the work, but the project needs £1.1m over the next 18 months to finish the job.

Hudswell community charity trust, set up by local residents, is looking to provide affordable and comfortable accommodation for hikers, cyclists and pilgrims costing around £28 a night, also to attract custom to the community-owned village pub and shop.

Tustee Martin Booth said: “Our old parish church is unfortunately no longer in use, we’re trying to give it a new lease of life and preserve its heritage for the village and the country.

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"It's on a network of paths to Richmond, two miles away. This is the most beautiful of the Yorkshire Dales and the paths from this hostel will lead right up Swaledale to Keld.

“The church is also close to the Coast to Coast path and there is going to be a ‘camino’ from Durham right down to the south coast and on to Santiago in Spain, so we think we can attract pilgrims to come to stay in the hostel in the church.”

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Mr Booth said there had been research backing the need for a hostel. He added: “There is no low cost, one-night accommodation in Richmond or Hudswell. We’re aiming for people who want to stay for one or two nights, travelling through mainly on foot or by cycle and there is definitely a gap in that market. We’re very confident there would be enough custom.

“We are extremely grateful for the YDNPA grant and the faith they have shown in us. It will preserve an important piece of the National Park’s heritage and provide a tourist facility to enable people to stay."

Charity treasurer Annie Sumner added: “We’re very lucky in this village we haven’t got huge numbers of holiday cottages, so we’re not suffering from that fatigue that some of the villages in the upper dales have. And we have a successful community-owned pub and shop, so we want people to come and use them.

“The pews seem to be too good to go to waste, so turning them into bunk beds seems like a good idea. I’ve asked a local joiner who will take them away and he thinks he can get at least some of the beds out of them.”

Rector the Reverend Martin Fletcher said because the churchyard is open so people can visit their loved ones' graves, "it’s very important the church isn’t let to go to wrack and ruin".

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“I’ve been here five years and when I came the church was already closed," he said. "But it’s not going to disappear, the building, so it needs to be maintained and it is loved by the village. 

“We are greatly blessed in the calibre of the people in this community who make things like the pub, the shop and the social housing work. If we can’t get this church to be repurposed in this way, with this group of people, then other church buildings have no chance of being repurposed.

“What we don’t want is for this church building to end up being some grand house, isolated from the community. We want it to remain part of the community.”