NEATLY headlined "Diocese advertises parish job with a catch", last week's Church Times carried a story about attempts to bait a new Vicar for the churches at Gainford and Winston, alongside the Tees between Darlington and Barnard Castle.

The "catch" is that the job is advertised with fishing rights - "a priest to follow in the footsteps of Peter, James and John," said Church Times - the problem that it is unpaid, what the Church calls "house for duty".

It's two years since the last man left; not a single priest replied to less alluring advertisements last summer. "The North generally, and the North-East in particular, continues to find it hard to attract new clergy," says Ian Jagger, the Archdeacon of Auckland (recently arrived from Portsmouth.)

At Ingleton, two miles up the road from Gainford, they have been luckier. The Rev David Elleanor, legally the priest-in-charge but known invariably as Vicar, has been in post for five years with not so much as a tin of tuna as inducement.

He's unpaid, too, what ecclesiastical sorts now call a Self Supporting Minister, or SSM for short - it used to be Non-Stipendiary Ministry until someone made the entirely reasonable point that a job description shouldn't start with a negative.

The days when every village church had a Vicar - and two or three curates to do the work - are gone; NSMs and NSenntial. It's not that men and women no longer want to be priests, rather that it is no longer financially possible to support them all.

David Elleanor is also a full-time solicitor in Bishop Auckland and an equally committed Newcastle United supporter. Thereby hangs a tale, candidly recounted by candlelight whilst his last bottle of Old Speckled Hen is shared between columnist and cameraman.

No greater love...

He was born in Consett, confirmed at St Paul's in Spennymoor - "I was quite excited about it at the time, but gave it up as people do" - returned to the church at university.

Soon he was a partner in a law firm. In the 1980s, he and his wife Jennifer decided to build a DIY dream home at Tudhoe - "I just got a book out of the library" - and on the day that all their own work was finally completed, stepped back to admire it.

"I think I'm being called to the ministry," announced David. It didn't, he adds, go down very well.

After another two or three years - "I'd been zapped but I wanted to be a proper lawyer first, I didn't want the feeling that I was running away from anything" - he was recommended for the full-time ministry, took a theology degree at Durham, became curate at Consett in 1988.

It meant moving from the dream home in Tudhoe to the curate's terraced house in Consett. "I was the boy," he says.

Three years later he returned to the law, for reasons that not even candid candlelight need elaborate, but which may be summed up with the suggestion that he didn't take a three-year theology degree to spend half his day pressing buttons on the photocopier.

In 1996 they again planned a house move. His secretary spotted that Ingleton vicarage was for sale - delicensed, as they say of public houses. David ("and me a Co Durham lad") thought that it must be caving country near Skipton.

Reorientated, they went to view. "The retiring Vicar's wife sussed in 27 seconds that I was NSM, said that they'd prayed for an NSM because they knew there would be no more full-time priests but never imagined that one would buy the vicarage as well."

Bidding was by sealed tender. The Elleanors', happily, was highest.

"The church thinks SSM is a brilliant idea, but you need a job that you can

work around it," he says. "You need a big house you're prepared to share with people, you have to be 100 per cent committed, if not 100 per cent available, and you have to have the heart for it. It's also best not to be too holy, which is why I always try to watch Newcastle even when I don't feel like it."

As Church of England clergy have long known, it also helps to have a supportive wife. "Jen's brilliant, a far better Christian than I am," he says. "Ingleton may have a part-time Vicar, but it has a full-time Vicar's wife."

The balancing act is impossible, "visiting" difficult, pastoral work reluctantly limited. Weddings can be arranged in advance but funerals are more difficult because not everyone gives six months notice of intent.

"I love the Church of England, love being a priest, love the village and the people here but there is simply not enough time for everything," he says. He also has more freedom to criticise. "They can't take the vicarage off me because I own it."

Ingleton is a village of around 650 people, St John's church built in 1844. We'd last been there in October 1994 when Michael Turnbull, consecrated the previous day, took his first Sunday service as Bishop of Durham.

He'd been at Ilkley Grammar School with John Boocock, then Ingleton's vicar, talked in his sermon of the view of creation from the Cow and Calf rocks, charmed all whom he met. A notice by the door had read "Slippery path, take care" - life's parable in four words, the column had concluded.

Seven years later we were back for the weekly service at St John's, the time changed to 6pm - "mucked about" says David - to accommodate his best man duties in Nottinghamshire the previous day. The Newcastle score had been regularly texted to him during the reception.

The congregation of 25 includes 90-year-old Norman Scurr, organist for the past half century, the service is "Prayer book" evensong followed by a short Holy Communion. The sermon - bit of Hebrew, bit of Greek - is about the Transfiguration.

David also mentions the Church Times piece on fishing rights, concedes that he shouldn't (in the circumstances) say too much about the press, but points out that the accompanying photograph is not of the tranquil Tees at Gainford but of the more turbulent waters of Low Force. "There's not too many fish caught up there," he adds.

Afterwards we return to the Old Vicarage, where there's almost immediately a power cut - "always happening in Ingleton" - a bottle of French fizz to chase down the Old Speckled Hen.

"John Boocock, a marvellous priest, trained people to do without him. People here have accepted responsibility as lay people increasingly will have to do.

"I like to think that people like what they are getting, but quite capable of accepting that they may not," says David. "They forgive you more if you choose to live here."

It's after nine o'clock, the village still in darkness, when we leave. Being a priest in Ingleton was a "huge, huge privilege", he'd said - the one who didn't get away.