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“It’s becoming a village of older people. All the young ones think about is getting out of the place. We’ve gone down in the world”.

His pessimism is shared by the chairman of the parish council who sees no point in spending a penny of the £1,600 raised towards the cost of building a village hall.

“The mode of life has changed so much we don’t feel it would be worth carrying on with the scheme… village life has deteriorated,” he says.

Variations of a bleak theme heard often in rural areas nowadays. Except that these comments were made about Sessay, in the Vale of York, 48 years ago.

Turn east off the A19 and there are honey-pot villages with tourists and second homes beneath the White Horse. Go west from the main road for a couple of miles – and few outsiders do – and things are rather different.

So what’s happened to Sessay since that critical assessment from within? As with election night: losses, gains and no change.

The post office and shop have gone and there’s no pub to provide solace because that shut decades ago.

Public transport is clinging on with a twice-weekly bus serving market day in Thirsk and Ripon. The perception is that the timetable was far better nearly half a century ago. In reality it was no different. Only two buses called each week.

In other signs of continuity, the village school is still flourishing and also draws children from parishes which weren’t so fortunate. And St Cuthbert’s Church, with its first female rector, is sufficiently confident about the future to have spent £28,000 on having the organ restored.

But for a practical reason behind Sessay’s salvation amid social upheaval, Janet Ratcliffe suggests looking no further than the premises the parish council was reluctant to construct in 1963. The village hall finally opened eight years later.

It’s now the home of the cricket, bowls, darts and drama clubs, the WI, the Tuesday Club, Sessay Singers, Sessay Ramblers when they aren’t rambling, and it has served the Brownies, a playgroup and as a youth club.

It’s fitting then that this year the hall is also hosting the village’s collective memories. The Sessay Archive is the result of exhaustive research into how it spent the last century. The story begins with an image of the offical tea laid out in the school room as part of the celebrations for George V’s coronation in 1911.

It coincided with a national census which recorded that among heads of local households were 24 farmers, a dozen farm labourers, 12 workers on the estate of Lord Downe (whose connections had owned Sessay for centuries), three brickmakers, a blacksmith, grocer, sexton, dressmaker, postmaster, innkeeper, and six railway employees serving the village’s station on the East Coast main line.

Along with the car and the mechanization of farming, the sale of the Downe estate to individuals in 1918 had the greatest impact on the village, explains Mrs Ratcliffe, a retired history teacher. She manages the archive project which won a £15,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

That year marked the end of slaughter on the battlefield – the rector’s son had been killed at the first Battle of Ypres – but a comment in the parish records makes no reference to the war. It focuses instead on the district’s “unsettled state” and its changing “tone and character” since his Lordship’s departure.

Sessay’s population has remained remarkably constant over the last century – 395 in 1911, and around 360 today – but the social balance has been been transformed. The number of farms has dropped from 24 to eight.

The evolution was well underway in 1982 when pupils at the village school carried out a survey of occupations and discovered, among others, two barristers, a chartered shipbroker, accountant, physiotherapist, lecturer, civil servant, and hairdresser.

Some arrived here through circumstances beyond their control. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Mary Kay was a young teacher who accompanied a group of children evacuated from Tyneside. She stayed, married a farmer and taught at the village school. Others have been there all their lives. The 150-acre Rooper Hill Farm was bought for £4,100 by the Corner family in 1918 and is still farmed by their grandsons, now aged 83, 76, and 71. One of the Ratcliffes’ elderly neighbours is an example of how the pull of the countryside is unbreakable for some. He passed the 11-plus but turned down his place at Thirsk grammar school because he didn’t fancy the five-mile bike ride. He became a handyman and archetypal countryman who rarely leaves the village and yet, says Janet, “he’s the most contented man you could wish to meet.”

The archive reveals Sessay’s contribution to the heroism of war, and its comic aspects on the home front. It had a Dad’s Army unit, based in a sandbagged hut behind Mr Knox’s farm. Originally they drilled using broomsticks but were eventually equipped with a shotgun – and a single cartridge. When more equipment eventually arrived one of the recruits, his identity never revealed, managed to shoot and narrowly avoid killing their sergeant during an exercise.

Those times couldn’t have been more different for farmer’s son Bernard Clayton. He was a member of the Dambusters squadron and won the DSO, DFC, and Conspicuous Gallantry Medal.

And Sessay is still producing heroes. Last year the cricket club, a mainstay of the area since at least 1850, defeated Shipton-under-Wychwood from Oxfordshire to win the final of the National Village Cricket Competition at Lord’s.

The project organisers were thrilled by the material which emerged. They found the long-forgotten recipe for Sessay Cake, a buttery sponge from the Victorian era; pictures of a farm sale, of harvest, and more recently of the Czech and Polish students who arrive each summer for a working holiday on the Spilmans’ fruit farm.

Janet Ratcliffe believes that crucial to the village’s well-being is its lack of second-home owners. “Yes, we’d like a shop and more affordable housing, and more young families, but we’re still a solid community. It’s not a place tourists bother with.”

But it is extraordinary in one respect. Not every village boasts a name to call all its own. It was Settan in Anglo-Saxon times, Sezai in the Domesday Book, and then, variously, Segege, Sezay, Sezza, Seasey and Seysey, before settling on an identity with a possibly French connection. More research is required. Sessay Local History Society, the newest group in the village is on the case.

Sessay Archive – A Snap in Time exhibition in the village hall, is open to everyone on the weekend of April 9-10. Saturday 10am-4pm , Sunday 1pm-4pm. Admission is free. There’ll be tea, coffee and, of course, Sessay Cake.