All Saints Church, Great Ayton

All Saints Church is tucked away behind the Conservation Club and only briefly visible from Yarm Lane. A brief glimpse then of sunlit sandstone as I cycled past on an otherwise overcast day. The church is Great Ayton’s original church. The main building is predominately 12^thcentury but Pevsner, the renown architectural historian, suggests the walls contain fragments of masonry that pre-date the Normans. A church in the village was mentioned in the Domesday Book, one of the few places in Cleveland to do so. The porch in the photo is a century later but would have been very familiar to the young James Cook who lived in the village as a boy. He would perhaps notice the absence of the tower, demolished in the 1880s. By the 1870s the village population had increased because of the ironstone mining and other industries and had outgrown the small All Saints Church and a new one, Christ Church, was built although All Saints is still used for services.