Great ideas of our time, part 397. Windscale, original name of Sellafield nuclear power station, is a donkey ride from the Irish Sea in remotest west Cumbria.

Immensely improbably, however impenetrably, Windscale play football in the Wearside League.

On Wednesday, the season's first home game, we took a one-way ticket to Sellafield and hoped to hitch home with Gateshead Reserves.

It was an evening match. The last train back left at five past six.

The guard from Darlington pondered the ticket suspiciously - as if the destination was Sierra Leone, or Saturn, or as if the ticket were itself radioactive - before perfunctorily punching approval.

They didn't, he reluctantly ventured, get many travelling from Darlington to Sellafield. Not without flasks, anyway.

It took four-and-a-half hours, change at Newcastle and Carlisle, down Cumberland's curious, captivating, come-up-and-see-me coastline and arriving at Sellafield's semaphore signalled station shortly before 4pm.

"For the town centre," said a notice on the station, "walk past BNFL and turn right."

BNFL is British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, Sellafield power station a grey, ghostly, Great Grimpen Mire of a place with a refulgent dome - though not of the sort that Kubla Khan decreed. It was Windscale, the original reactor.

There is a noise, but not much of one. The seagulls effortlessly out-shout it.

The security fencing is topped with coiled barbed wire, like the Scrubs, notices intermittently asserting that it is a BNFL licensed site, lest anyone mistake it for one of Billy Butlin's.

A plaque mourns those killed in the Windscale reactor fire of 1957.

There was no right turn, no football field and so far as several miles could ascertain, no town or town centre, either. After an hour, we asked a BNFL policeman, in shirt sleeves and statutory plantpot.

"There is no town centre," confirmed the polliss, affably.

"Village centre, then?"

"No village centre, no village, nothing at all except the power station," said the polliss, adding greatly to Sellafield's secrets.

We asked why it said "town centre" at the railway station. What had BNFL done to it?

Hundreds of years hence, would Sellafield town centre be rediscovered, like the remains of some Atlantian civilisation?

The policeman called reinforcements, his mate from the gatehouse.

The second polliss said he'd once played football at Windscale but couldn't remember where the ground was. Too much exposure, perhaps.

A call home, more prudent in the first place, revealed that Windscale FC actually play at Egremont. About 15 miles away, said the policeman.

The nuclear reaction might easily be imagined. It was time for the last train out.

Only so far north as Whitehaven, thence a £10 taxi ride to Egremont, a place where they'll go a long way for a decent game of football.

Asked Egremont's principal claim to fame, however, locals unanimously reply that it is the home of the world gurning championships, though it once had a Rowntree's chocolate factory, too.

A Windscale player had also appeared on the same photograph as David Beckham.

"A good footballer, too, but liked his Friday nights out too much," laments Geoff Turrell, the club chairman.

Gateshead's team bus inches through the council estate ahead of the taxi, the classic case of kick-off being whenever you can get there.

The latest, says Geoff, was the midweek match scheduled to start at 6.30pm, which finally got going at five past eight.

"It was pitch black when we finished," he says, unwittingly unleashing all the Windscale wisecracks about glowing in the dark.

"I can't remember when I last heard an original one," he adds.

The extensive Falcons Sports Club, where they play, is run for Sellafield employees.

This week's company newsletter reminds them that, though decommissioning is under way, there'll still be 4,000 workers in 2018.

It also lists internal teams like Blistered Palms, Monkey Spankers and Silos Select.

Gateshead chairman Mike Coulson, once a referee, says that though they had to leave at 4pm they've had no problems on the north-west frontier.

Gateshead's not exactly on Wearside, either.

"It was a bit of a shock to the manager's system, and we got stuck behind a haywagon south of Carlisle, but we knew we had to come here when we joined the league," says Mike. "At least it's in the summer."

Geoff Turrell, also chief executive of Cumberland County FA, wishes to correct the constabulary. Sellafield's just over the hill, he says, five miles maximum.

Formed for the Windscale workers, the club now has the FA's coveted "Charter" status, has 16 qualified coaches and runs junior teams from eight to 18 but can't find a suitable league for the Under 18s because the nearest is in Carlisle and the league reckons it's too far.

They joined the Wearside League 12 years ago, on the bottom rung of the national football pyramid because there was no equivalent league in Cumbria.

No one gets travel sick, insists Turrell, no one regrets going over to the other side.

"I said when we did it that the first Friday night I had to ring around to raise a team would be our last season in the league, but we've never had just nine or ten players.

"We were quite naive at first. I wouldn't say we had good hidings, but we learned a few lessons. There's some very good football in the North-East."

There's a club mini-bus, no payment, no expenses and positively no face twisting like the guys with their head through the horse collar - a real good bunch of lads, says Geoff and long accustomed to coast to coasting.

There have, of course, been wasted journeys - like the floodlight failure at Roker or the time that Wolviston left Teesside in bright sunshine and found Windscale under water.

"We just gave them some food, had a few drinks and called it 1-1. I'm afraid it does get a bit wetter here than over your side."

Wednesday's match kicks -off at 7.15pm, an early penalty, handball, giving Windscale victory.

A Windscale player is also booked, though the foul looks innocuous enough.

"It must be because of his hair cut," says one of the 30 or so crowd, admitted without charge.

Afterwards there's food, drink and warm wishes for a safe journey home.

It's midnight when the subdued Gateshead bus drops us near Corbridge, another hour before any of us will hit the haywagon - on a Windscale of 1-10, an altogether illuminating experience.

Backtrack Briefs

Terry Farley, once a leading Football League referee and for the past 42 years the elderly secretary of Bishop Auckland Referees Society, underwent heart bypass surgery yesterday.

At South Cleveland hospital he told the surgeon, a Newcastle United season ticket holder, that one of his unfulfilled ambitions was to climb Everest.

"You'll be able to manage Roseberry Topping," said the doc, eyeing the view from the window.

Terry, great lad, is 70 and lives in Newton Aycliffe. "I've no trepidation at all, rather I'm looking forward to getting it out of the way," he said.

His many friends in football will wish the Silver Fox a swift return to full vigour.

These things work wonderfully, of course. King of the ground-hoppers John Dawson, who had his bypass in April, is home in Hartlepool after chalking up ten new grounds in Ireland. "I feel champion," he insists.

The Northern Alliance has five new clubs this season, the Central Midlands League seven. His record's 280 games in a season. "If the money stretches," says John, "who knows?"

Another day in London on Tuesday, where the FA does a canny quiche, but cacophonous meetings.

We were grateful to the Evening Standard, however, for drawing attention to an item in the "Corrections and Clarifications" column in that morning's Guardian.

"In our interview yesterday with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: 'Our team was the worst in the first division and I'm sure it'll be the worst in the Premier League'.

"Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was 'Our tea was the worst in the first division and I'm sure it'll be the worst in the Premier League'. Profuse apologies."

Neither fun nor games in the George Coates Cup semi-final between Horden and Newcastle City second teams on Wednesday: whilst the home team, the umpires and a supporter who'd come by bus from Newcastle waited at the Welfare Ground, the visitors waited on Tyneside.

They've been thrown out. "There was no doubt who was the home club. I find it quite extraordinary that they should forget," says competition secretary Ray Matthews.

Horden now play either Stockton or Hetton Lyons, who met last night, in the final at Boldon on Sunday.

Returned from the annual Ambleside fell races, John Boyd rings in a state of some anxiety. "They were making a big fuss of this feller called Billy Teesdale, winner for the past six years," John reports. "It can't be the Bulldog, can it?" We assure him that it cannot. Apart from anything else, Bulldog Billy has gout.

Niall Quinn, awarded an honorary MBE on Wednesday, is back in active sport - playing hurling in his native Ireland, reports the Sunderland fanzine The Wearside Roar.

"Some people say I'm mad but I'm having a ball," says big Niall.

Hurling, he adds, has a sense of decency and fun. "Soccer is too clinical now. The camaraderie is long gone."

And finally...

Tuesday's column sought the identity of the three cricketers whose surname began with a C, who took all 20 wickets in a 1980s test match against England.

It prompted Hails of Hartlepool to both a reverie and the right answer and John Scott in Darlington ("sticking my neck out") simply to the right answer.

It was England against New Zealand at Headingley, 1983 - Lance Cairns finished the match with 10-144, Jeremy Coney and Euan Chatfield claiming the other wickets in a match in which the Crowe brothers also played. Today, back across the Pennines. Readers are invited to identify the Cumbrian lad whose Football League career began at Blackpool, who won 62 England caps and who was Footballer of the Year in 1976-77.We return on Tuesday.

Published: 15/08/2003