WHEN Norman de Bretteville gave Yafforth a church in 1208 it was "to celebrate divine service, every day for ever". Forever's a pretty long time, of course, and, over 900 years, Yafforth's not got much bigger nor the times more manifestly god-fearing. The faithful few remain determined, nonetheless, that divine service will still be celebrated - if not every day then certainly every Sunday and if not for ever, then for as long as they're central to its arrangement.

"It feels like a proper village when you've got a church," says Dorothy Pickering. "We've lost the pub, we don't want to lose the church as well."

Yafforth's a mile or so west of Northallerton, a village of 66 homes so closely set together that it would be possible to walk around it between the first and last verses of a good recessional hymn.

On the little green, a notice board advertises a pantomime, an auction of promises and a podiatrist - none of them in Yafforth - and one of those ubiquitous "earnings opportunities" that promises no boss, no stress, no traffic and about £50,000 a week. Not much credibility, either.

Across the road stands Reveller Mews, named after a long-gone Derby winner owned - like much else thereabouts - by the Masterman family and said to be buried beneath the 16th tee at Bedale Golf Club. The pub, closed a few years ago, was The Revellers, too.

Once there were two shops, three brickyards, a Primitive Methodist chapel which closed in 1966 when two of the three regulars came from Northallerton in the minister's car - "it's wicked," Mrs Harriet Merryweather had said, "all they want today is bingo" - and a schoolroom which opened in 1865, closed in 1952 and remains unaltered in the interim.

Still it stands, occasionally used by the church, Rules for the Conducting of the School displayed, draconian, on the wall.

Subjects of instruction would be the Holy Scripture and the Church Catechism, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Plain sewing and knitting "but no Fancy work." Every child would pay 2d a week for reading, or 3d when they began to learn writing, except for farmers' children who would pay 4d and 6d.

Additionally, the school board rule board decreed, children would pay 6d on October 1 and 6d at Christmas "for the fire", would be required to be decently clean and neat and to be of orderly behaviour.

"Just like they are today," says Brenda Boulton, who teaches in Colburn and worships, every week, at Yafforth.

Another ten had joined her last Sunday, more than usual but the first service for a few weeks because, ever optimistic, they'd been expecting the painters in.

Snowdrops bloom bravely along the path, a single bell calls timelessly, a notice in the porch announces that the church's diocesan "share" for 2000-2001 was two thousand and some-odd pounds and that the share has been paid in full.

A raffle of millennium samplers has raised £367, home-made marmalade another tenner.

How on earth do they manage to keep it going?

"With difficulty," says John Walker, once in Yafforth, who now comes every week from Northallerton.

Though traces of the Norman building remain, the present All Saints church cost £1,600 in 1870, principally subscribed by the Mastermans "The Victorians heightened it and ruined it," said John Walker, the 19th Century font now banished out of sight in the vestry.

For over eight centuries it was a daughter church of Danby Wiske, three miles to the north. Now it's part of a group of four churches centred on Ainderby Steeple, a couple of miles the other way.

Peter Warren, the Rector, is assisted by Malcolm Gourley, a 62-year-old pharmacist of whose ordination at Great Smeaton to the non-stipendiary ministry the column wrote in 1998.

Mr Gourley leads Sunday's service from the Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy almost unchanged since 1662 except that the plea that Her Majesty's government might "truly and indifferently minister justice" has been changed to "truly and impartially". For fear of ambivalence, no doubt.

Two or three wall heaters fight a losing battle. The walls might be heated but the rest of us are half-perished. As is the way of the Church of England, the congregation remains well scattered. In Yafforth it is both old religion and cold religion.

We sing familiar hymns like Be Thou My Guardian and My Guide and are about to sing one extremely unfamiliar when the Yafforth Ten object that they don't know it and it is immediately changed, an interesting exercise in ecclesiastical democracy.

First Sunday in Lent, Mr Gourley preaches on temptation, prefaces his observation - "no offence to our guest" - with the curious observation that all the media are interested in is bad news and then retreats to the sanctuary, where there's an electric fire. Afterwards, breath still hanging hoary in the air, they talk of all that Yafforth church still means to them. Maybe it won't go on for ever, as the benefactor bravely had intended, but they'd be back - and glad of it - next week