THE most memorable start to a sermon had hitherto been delivered by Dr

David Hope, the former Archbishop of York, at the annual cyclists’ service in Coxwold, North Yorkshire.

That was before Andrew Fagg rose to his feet on Sunday and compared Easter to the previous day’s Wensleydale Creamery League football match between Hawes United and the Buck Hotel from Richmond.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto the cyclists’ café at Gargrave,” began Dr Hope and it was only several years later that a sausage sandwich suggested he was right.

Giant sized and genial, accent as broad as a prize bull’s buttocks, Andy Fagg’s a Hawes lad and very proud of it, though he works nights in the BBC Radio newsroom in London, commutes between the two and when not reading between the headlines wonders what he’s next going to say from the pulpit.

On Saturday, he’d finished a shift at 8am, caught a northbound train, was dismayed to find it diverted via Llandudno or somewhere, drove for an hour from Northallerton to the top of Wensleydale, said hello to the family, grabbed his football kit and at 1.30pm was ready for kick-off.

United were 3-0 down. “We were absolutely finished, almost dead and gone,” he tells his Easter Sunday congregation.

Then they scored, followed soon afterwards by a second. Andy, who’s 35, himself headed the equaliser though in so doing received a kick in the face which left him spark out on the grass and unable to continue. “He looked terrible,” says his mum.

On Sunday he wears a sticking plaster over a cut nose and has a pair of eyes which, while not suggesting 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali, speak slightly of a dust-up with the greatest’s grandma.

It may not be said that the idea for an Easter Sunday sermon had hit him in the face, because that was a Buck Hotel boot. Nor might the poor lad be supposed to have followed the scriptural precept of turning the other cheek, being in no state to do so. It cured one headache, nonetheless.

Wisely, he avoids references to scars or, directly, to resurrection, but the lesson for the day is clear. “When things look dead and buried, like they did for Hawes United, remember the Easter story. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, just like Hawes United.”

Hawes 4 Buck Hotel 3.

IN the dear departed days of the At Your Service column, it was customary in a quiet week to scour the village paragraphs of the Darlington & Stockton Times in the hope of finding a pearl beneath the parish pump.

Ponder the joy, therefore, if discovering not just a 2pm service at Hawes Junction Methodist chapel, but one followed by tea and that the service would be led by Mr Andrew Fagg. Both are known; both are brilliant.

The AYS column had attended the little Mount Zion chapel at Hawes Junction in 2008, the lady of the house so overwhelmed by the quality and the generosity of the post-service repast that she recalled words of John Wesley’s on one of his fairly frequent visits to Weardale.

The promised land from Killhope top I now exult to see

My hope is full – oh glorious hope – of good spice cake and tea.

Its other incomparable glory is that the chapel is just half a mile from Garsdale railway station on the Settle and Carlisle railway, one of the most glorious places in Christendom.

The first train ran on May 1, 1876, the same day that the chapel’s foundation stone was laid.

On Easter Sunday, the station’s familiarly blessed-blasted. A sign at the bottom of the Coal Road to Lee Yeat warns that it rises to 1750ft and that winter conditions may be dangerous. The way the water’s cascading that vertiginous slope, they mightn’t be too clever in spring, either.

On the southbound platform there’s a bench in memory of a 1950s station master called Breeze, who might more appropriately have been named Gale, and on the northbound a poster advertising that the station master for Garsdale is Chris.

These days Chris is now likely to be responsible for the whole line between Horton-in-Ribblesdale and Appleby-in-Westmoreland and probably a few municipal libraries as well.

There’s also a bronze memorial to Ruswarp, a border collie whose paw print was on the petition opposing the proposed closure of the line in the 1980s.

In 1990 shortly after news that it had been reprieved, Ruswarp and his owner Graham Nuttall were walking in the Welsh mountains when Graham died from a heart attack. It was 11 weeks before they found him, the collie still at his side. The dog attended his master’s funeral, but itself died soon afterwards.

The hail ricochets from the waiting room roof, the grey slates of Railway Cottages reflect refulgently. It’s the first day of British Summer Time, light nights meaning that there’s longer to see the rain.

A rare example of integrated transport, the Little White Bus waits patiently, like Ruswarp for his master. Is the distant noise the sound of an approaching train or the wind wassailing across Dandry Mire? It matters little. God’s in his heaven, and all not quite so wrong with the world.

HAWES Junction chapel closed in 1979 but was saved – resurrected? – by the Friends of Mount Zion Chapel who hold occasional but regular services there. The 2008 column was headlined “Friends in high places”.

Back then the service was to have been on the platform at Garsdale, Hawes Silver Band in attendance, but was driven indoors by the

elements. Before the war, the Church of England held monthly services in the waiting room, accompanied by a harmonium known as Ill Wind because it blew no one any good.

In 2008 the service had been led by Geoff Phillips, who told the dales story of the teacher telling her class about the parable of the lost sheep. Why search for one when the other 99 are safe?

A hand shoots up. “Please, miss, because t’other one is’t tup.”

Little may have changed since the days of the railway pioneers. The hymn book’s the 1933 edition, a label inside the cover acknowledging that it was a scholar’s attendance prize at Heptonstall Methodist Church, which sounds like it should be in Lancashire, but is maybe Yorkshire.

The label records that the value of marks gained was a shilling and the cost of the book 2/3d. “Amount to pay, 1/3d.” Yorkshire, then.

Andy, a Methodist local preacher, says that – “as usual” – he can’t think of anything to say, but says it most vividly, nonetheless. He also talks of fothering down on the farm – something to do with spreading food for the animals, apparently – and sings with a sort of concertina motion, like the kid working the Ill Wind’s bellows.

The little chapel is packed. We end with Thine Be the Glory, hymnody’s greatest hit, and with the feeding of the five thousand. For those huddled inside Hawes Junction chapel, and for the brave boys of Hawes United, a thoroughly happy Easter.

n Songs of Praise on Garsdale station will be held at 11am on Sunday, May 8 – weather permitting – followed by buffet lunch in the chapel. Details at mountzionchapel.org.uk