OUT with the old, in with a New Year tradition. Gayle Methodist Chapel has held a New Year's Day Festival since at least 1845, when more than 150 sat down to the free tea which, no less customarily, follows.

The chapel history also records the case of two Victorian boys, "under discipline" and thus refused the repast, who caught a duck, climbed on to the chapel roof and stuffed the unfortunate bird down the chimney.

"The falling soot caused confusion and dirt," notes the history, adding that the miscreants were duly "chastised". The belt which bound the Bible could be stropped for less scriptural purposes, too.

The fate of the poor duck is unrecorded, though it may not have had a very happy New Year.

Gayle's at the top of Wensleydale, a mile above Hawes, a fascinating, stone built, snicketty, perhaps pernicketty sort of a village which clings (though surely not for warmth) to the sides of the half-frozen, still tumultuous, Gayle Beck.

The stiles are still guarded by notices warning of foot-and-mouth precautions, the village institute remains an institution. "We got a grant for t'spot," says Allen Dinsdale. Two high roads stretch still further into the beyond.

Like much of the upper dale, it is a community of Allens and of Aldersons, of Calverts, Metcalfes and Ivesons. When ten babies were baptised one Sunday in the 1890s, nine were Ivesons.

Mostly, though, they are Dinsdales, the pioneers from Dinsdale, near Darlington. In the mid-18th Century there were 64 Dinsdales in Gayle, over a quarter of the population, and another 50 in Hawes. In 1861 five Dinsdale children, all aged under three, died within a month.

Allen, a Methodist local preacher since 1964, is now the chapel's senior steward, a friendly, ruddy-faced dalesman with a good singing voice.

Ned Dinsdale, a predecessor between the world wars, is recalled for his prayer of thanksgiving one woebegone, washed-out Wensleydale Sabbath. "Lord, we praise you that it is not always as wet as it is today."

Other Dinsdales worked in the local coal mine or were grist to Gayle cotton mill, first turned in 1784 and which may shortly, reel thing, be restored. Methodism, religious non-conformity anyway, was fast becoming established, too.

The chapel was built in 1833, altered and much enlarged in 1879. There were love feasts, revival meetings and Bands of Hope and at Christmas they'd walk for miles singing carols, always at Gaudy Farm in time for the King's broadcast.

Between 1927-39, 11 men from that small village became preachers, though there were ill winds, even in Gayle.

There were hard workers and hard drinkers, abusers of the sanctified Sabbath and in one year alone, 19 illegitimate births. Frequent feuds blew up with the Hawes folk, too, though the reputed ultimate insult - "Ya can buy nowt in Gayle" - seems both innocuous and inarguable.

There is neither pub nor shop, just a small bus garage that was once a coach house and a country house hotel which has won national awards.

The chapel - high, set square, balconied, manifestly loved - is the only one in the dale which retains two Sunday services, 2pm and 6.30pm. "There's just summat special about it, an atmosphere that you don't get in other places," says Richard Dinsdale, the long-time Sunday School superintendent. "They tried to stop the evening service once, but that night 39 turned up. They couldn't stop it then."

Like almost everywhere else, congregations are declining, nonetheless. The Sunday School, 45 strong in 1978, meets no longer; the once-famous choir is silent.

The New Year Festival, once entirely presented by the Sunday School, continues with adult assistance. Only the tea remains unalterably cornucopian, famously free.

"People all over the dale talk of the Gayle supper. There's always abundance," says Allen.

The late James Alderson, a Methodist minister born in Gayle and 1910 and happily returned for his last quarter century, wrote a dialect verse about the annual occasion:

On Kesmis Eve, t' chapil foak

wad aal sing i' the street,

On New Year's Day aalt villidge

kids were given a treat,

At neet tha' sang t'owld favrites,

wi gusto en wi' fire,

Skule kids recited en the wer items wi t'choir.

George Calvert, a Gayle roadman, has also been moved to verse:

Wa awlis had that grand hymn ta Sarah 'And are we yet alive",

En wa sang it wi't owd Gayle tradition

Wi' a gusto et meead yer throoats thrive.

We'd recitations en singin' wi't scholars

En anthems en solos bi't choir,

Owd Bill Go wez yen evt main speakers

An owd Gayler, just full o' fire.

On Tuesday at 6.30pm, a crisp and starry night in a darkly beautiful village, they did it all once more. The column first-footed, too.

New year, old Adam, the gossip before the service was of hip replacements and of cataracts, and whatever it is that there's a lot of going about.

Maybe 30 had hung their hats, a few peering down from the circle, just three tinselled children to perform their party pieces and a few younger ones to regard it more as play school than Sunday School.

The children sang Little Donkey and a carol to the ubiquitous tune of Danny Boy, a lady read from The Puffin Book of Christmas Poems, another delivered a monologue about how to give a pill to a cat. (It's a frustrating and a painful business; in the end they got a hamster instead.)

Martin James, Wensleydale's minister and a prolific poet, read "Andy's Song" - a neat little number about the apostle Andrew and his brother, Pete. Pete rhymed with judgement seat.

There were prayers for rural recovery - 2001 is best forgotten in the dales, as elsewhere - for reconciliation and for peace. Manifestly it was appreciated, an old-fashioned, little-changing Auld Lang Syne experience.

The tea in the school room was all that they'd said it would be, too. Though perishing outside, it had been fortifying within. Gayle warming, beyond argument.

* The Rev James Alderson wrote both the chronicle of Gayle Chapel and Under Wetherfell, a history of the civil parish of Hawes. When I Wer A Lad, a book of his dialect poems, has just been reprinted by the Wensleydale Press. Thanks to Linda Butters for the loan of all three.

Published: 05/01/2002