IT'S just turned 5am when we head out into Easter, a restless chanticleer already crowing its silly head off. Too late, old cock, too late. Up A1, A68 and A689 into Weardale, spring daffodils and occasional Easter bunnies caught in the hyperbolic headlights, still pitch black past Stanhope.

Everyone else has remembered to put the clocks forward; has Mother Nature slept in?

It's to be Weardale Methodists' now traditional start to Easter Sunday - early to rise, as it were - a moor top occasion known as a sunrise service until experience overcame expectation and they called it a dawn service, instead. A hot cross bun fight follows.

We'd attended it three years ago, the day after the Queen Mother died, the morning also memorable for the presence of a chapel going Chihuahua called Zacchaeus after the little feller in the gospels who climbed a tree to get a better look.

This time Zacchaeus had thought better of it. Meteorologically, at any rate, it's not fit to turn a dog out.

"Bit savage," someone says.

"Aye," echoes her friend, "savage."

The service is 1,500 feet up Middlehope Common, turn right at Ireshopeburn, past a red car seemingly abandoned in the middle of nowhere and just keep heading for the heavens.

The car is John Raine's, it transpires, probably been up all night helping with the calving. John's reckoned in his 70s, and probably used to it by now.

"We'll not be seeing much of him this morning," someone says, though this morning, in truth, they can hardly see a hand in front of them.

About 25 are gathered by 6.20am. Les Hann, the minister, isn't among them, though it's reported that his light was on as folk passed. It'll be their Jill, they agree, trying to stir him from his slumbers.

By half past six, of course, John Wesley would have ridden 12 miles, preached a couple of sermons, got the coal in, read the Methodist Recorder cover to cover and be wondering what's for breakfast.

Les and Jill Hann, lovely folk, arrive up the steep and rugged soon afterwards, carrying the orders of service and by a cheery chorus of Good Mornings.

The glad occasion notwithstanding, the column is incorrigibly reminded of Eeyore's rheumy rejoinder in such circumstances. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt."

It is, of course it is. You know what they say about darkest hour.

"Do you think we're going to see the dawn?"

"Why, mebbe we'll just have to imagine it."

"I think there's a torch in my car."

"Fat lot of good it is in your car, Les."

Rain, mist and mercury are down simultaneously: eight degrees when first the cock crew, just three atop Middlehope Common, and automotive thermometers don't do wind chill factor.

An occasional, unidentifiable sound drifts upwards from the shrouded moor. Perhaps it's the sound of calving, perhaps of the valiant John Raine, wondering what to call this 'un, then.

The service is held on rough pasture, carts and clarts, visibility ten yards. Les's three minute Easter message is frozen in time and space, in which the hymnist reminds us we are all dwellers.

"You may not be able to see the dawn but it is there," says the minister, "just as in the dark days when He doesn't seem to be there, He is."

The frozen, fast frame photographer has had him in his sights almost throughout. "Every time I look up he's pointing at me," says Les, "It's a good thing I'm not scratching my ear."

Just so long as it's only your ear, minister.

We sing Christ the Lord is Risen Today and - Hallelujah - Thine Be the Glory, hear again the wonderful story of Easter events very early in the morning, wish one another a blessed and a peaceful Easter before hurrying off to bright lights and breakfast in Westgate Methodist church hall.

Perhaps uniquely after a church service, no-one hangs around to blether after this one.

There are three toasters, five loaves but (so far as may be ascertained) no fishes. There are hot cross buns and hard boiled eggs, home made blackberry and apple jam and an impromptu jarping competition in which Mr Hann's unparalleled success prompts comments which should perhaps never be made about a Methodist minister's egg.

He's a jolly good 'un, for all that.

A nice little girl called Laura Edy has dyed her eggs to resemble me and the lady driver - the glasses are the giveaway - while the lady in turn, having somewhat inexplicably given up cheese for Lent, is presented with a heart shaped selection box from Stanhope farmers' market.

Down dale after eight, morning hasn't so much broken as broken off negotiations. For all that it has been a simply joyous Easter morning, and a real privilege to be up there to share it with them. There's no denying that at all.

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