Most English villages have one church. Bywell has two, and both are extraordinary. St Andrew's stands near Bywell Hall and is now redundant, preserved by the Churches Conservation Trust. Its Anglo-Saxon tower - fifty-five feet high, about fifteen feet square - is considered the best in Northumberland. The tower probably dates from the early eleventh century. Inside, fragments of an Anglo-Saxon cross survive. The medieval expansion was extensive: a thirteenth-century font, where the sporting novelist Robert Surtees was baptised in 1806, sits in the nave, and medieval grave covers are built decoratively into the walls. St Peter's, a few hundred yards away among trees by the river, has its own square medieval tower and clear Saxon stonework. A tide dial scratched into the south wall - a primitive sundial used to mark the canonical hours - is the kind of detail that makes ecclesiastical historians lower their voices.

The double-church arrangement is unusual and not entirely explained. One theory holds that the two parishes - St Andrew's and St Peter's - represented different feudal jurisdictions, one held by the Bishop of Durham and the other by the Balliol or Neville families. Another theory points to a remembered Saxon double minster of clerics and nuns. Whatever the original reason, the duplication survived into the modern parish system, and both churches kept their congregations until St Andrew's was finally declared redundant in the twentieth century. St Peter's still holds services. St Andrew's holds silence and its Anglo-Saxon tower. The two stand close enough together that a single walk around them takes ten minutes, and that walk takes you past a thousand years of English ecclesiastical history.

Bywell Hall, a Palladian house of 1766 by James Paine, is the seat of the Beaumont family - the Viscounts Allendale. Wentworth Canning Blackett Beaumont, who became the 2nd Viscount Allendale, was born at the Hall in 1860. The grounds have hosted the Northumberland County Show since 2013. Each May, Lord and Lady Allendale stage a hunter trial in aid of the Charlotte Straker Project, a local hospice. Just up the slope stands Bywell Castle, the gatehouse tower Ralph Neville built in 1430 and never finished. King Henry VI sheltered there after the Battle of Hexham in 1464, the unfinished castle hosting the unfinished king. Hall and castle and church and church - all on the same bend of the river, all within sight of each other - make Bywell a kind of accidental museum of English landed history.

St Peter's holds a memorial that is easy to miss. A single lancet window commemorates Henry Parr Dwarris, the parish curate, who was drowned in the Tyne. The river that gives Bywell its name and its setting has, over the centuries, also taken some of its people. The Tyne at this point runs deep around the bend, the current strong against the north bank where the village stands. Another inscription in the church remembers William Wailes, the Newcastle stained-glass artist, who died in 1881. The stained glass in northern English churches owes a lot to Wailes's workshop. There are monuments to the Fenwicks of Bywell and the Bacons of Styford. None of the names are widely famous. They are simply the people who built this place and were buried here, and the village that contains them is still doing what villages are for: holding on to the people who passed through, in stone and glass and one unfinished castle.