Friends in high places

10:30am Saturday 24th May 2008

It's tiny and a little bit out of the way, but services at Hawes Junction Methodist chapel still draw in the crowds.

GARSDALE railway station, top end of Wensleydale and then up a bit further, is one of the most glorious and least likely places in Christendom.

Opened on the Settle and Carlisle line in 1876, originally called Hawes Junction, it was so greatly exposed to the elements that even the turntable had to be stockaded, lest a steam engine be blown wholly off track.

Graham Nuttall loved the old place, too. In the 1980s, the route reduced to two trains a day and facing closure, he became the first secretary of the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle Line.

Ruswarp, his faithful border collie, was the only animal to sign the petition - the paw print accepted because she, too, was a regular user and would face hardship if the line were axed.

In January 1990, shortly after hearing of their victory, Graham and Ruswarp set out to walk the mid-Welsh mountains.

Though an extensive search was mounted, nothing more was seen of Graham until another walker found his body 11 weeks later. The collie was still at his side, attended his master's funeral but died soon afterwards.

A poster gives details of a plan to raise £8,000 for a life-size bronze memorial to Ruswarp. It will be erected on the station, Graham's favourite place and just about mine, too.

Contributions can be made online at www.settle-carlisle.com/webshop/ RuswarpAppeal THAT literally breathtaking little station, on a line now busier than ever, is neither Garsdale's only wonder nor improbable survivor.

The tiny Mount Zion Methodist chapel, built by the railway navvies in a style similar to the station and opened in the same year, has Friends, too - and Friends, it might be said, in high places.

Erected thanks to the enthusiasm of local gamekeeper Reuben Alton on land which cost £5, it closed in 1979, reopened a few years later, now holds occasional but regular services and frequently finds them thronged.

"You should have been here at Christmas,"

says Andrew Souter, secretary of the Friends of Hawes Junction Chapel.

"We even had eight people standing in the pulpit."

This one was to have been a Songs of Praise on the platform at Garsdale, the accompanying presence of Hawes Silver Band ensuring that it would be at least half way to paradise and the promise of a chapel tea thereafter all but completing the journey.

The station had been used as a place of worship before, Church of England services held before the war in the little waiting room and once featuring prominently in the Daily Express. There was an elderly harmonium, too, not entirely originally known as the ill wind that blew nobody any good.

The Anglicans only attracted a handful, however, even after a full-page plug in what then was Britian's biggest newspaper.

"Garsdale was a Methodist valley,"

wrote dales historian Bill Mitchell in his book on the area, "and the Methodists had the sort of faith which moved mountains."

NOT even faith, alas, can do much about the weather - so inclement that the service is moved down to the chapel, where the tea is already set on trestle tables down the length of both sides.

The central pews already taken, we sit against the wall immediately behind a feast for the five thousand. At once the eighth commandment comes to mind - the one about not stealing plate pie, egg and cress sandwiches or rather splendid vol-au-vents, at least not while the service is in progress. It is obeyed with much difficulty.

The chapel's chocker, lifting like longgone days, a chap with a camera perched on a window sill, several involuntarily outside. "We used to have sit outside in the summer," says Andrew. "It would have been fine but for the midges."

THE service is amiably led by Geoff Phillips, interspersing the hymns with little shafts of Yorkshire wit and wisdom, like the little lad's definition of conscience - "summat that meks me tell my mother before my sister tells her first".

He also essays the story about the teacher who narrates the parable of the lost sheep and asks the class why, with 99 safe and sound, the shepherd's so concerned about the 100th."Please, miss,"

says a bright one, "perhaps it were't tup."

The hymns are all familiar, all popular, all - praise be - sung to what reasonable folk might suppose to be the "right" tune.

It's a magnificent occasion, the faithful giving it what fettle like a coal-shovelling fireman on the Long Drag out of Ribbledale.

We sing Praise My Soul the King of Heaven, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehova, How Great Thou Art and many more.

"It's so important to keep these little country chapels open," says Geoff. Too true.

THE spread's gargantuan, pretty near the second wonder of the modern world after the incomparable railway out the back. The folk are smashing, too.

Harry Allen, who first attended Mount Zion in 1948, recalls Sunday School trips to Morecambe - "once even to Blackpool"

- when the bairns would be given 2/6d from the chapel and another half crown from a shopkeeper up in Sedbergh.

"We were truly millionaires," says Harry, "at least we were for a day."

They'd get an orange on Good Friday, too. While it may not have been quite the same as five shillings, it was still - as a well-bred Yorkshire lad might say - better than nowt.

Edna Waggott recalls her mother, Jenny Thornborrow, who became a local preacher - one of about 14 with roots at Mount Zion - and pretty much everything else at the chapel, too.

"She'd have been so pleased," says Edna, "to have seen and heard everything that's gone on here today."

■ The Friends hope to raise around £20,000, already half way there, to build a kitchen and toilet at the back of the chapel and to make it more widely available for community use.

"When all the people went, so did most of the community facilities," says Andrew. "There's not even a shop for six miles."

The next big event, a "Sankey evening" with Muker Silver Band and the Gunnerside Choir, is at Hawes Market Hall at 7.30pm on Friday, June 13 - tickets £5, children £2.50. Carols by candlelight at 7.30pm on December 13.

Details of all events on www.mount zionchapel.co.uk, or on 01969-667291.

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