The congregation at Ramshaw chapel may be depleted, but there's an abundant sense of worship.

WHEN Charles Wesley wrote the glorious hymn Oh For A Thousand Tongues To Sing, it is unlikely that he could have envisaged the average country chapel in the 21st century, where the voice count fails frequently to reach double figures.

We sang it at Ramshaw for all that, sang it lustily and in good heart, sang it all seven of us. Oh for another 993.

Ramshaw's a former pit village, little more than a long terrace really, across the stream from Evenwood in south-west Durham.

Railley Fell colliery and Evenwood railway station once huffed and hewed at the western end of the village, a mineral line steamed back and forth at the other, a couple of shops and a post office were kept in full vigour.

Now there are just two pubs and the chapel, built in 1870 and hanging on in, and above one of the pubs an Indian restaurant, recently and improbably opened and with a temporary but equally unlikely link with Wesley's hymn. More of that ere leaving.

"It isn't like Durham Cathedral, it wasn't built with the best materials around," says Melvyn McConnell, the chapel steward, but it had survived the weekend storms - more than many a fine tree en route - and may withstand much more yet.

"It's friendly, it's very peaceful and you get a real uplift when you come in here," says 81-year-old Sarah Keeling. "It's hard, but we pull together and we keep on going."

Probably there'd have been one or two more for last Sunday's covenant service but for the bug - "the same cough everyone's got," says Sarah, democratically - that so greatly ails this January.

There'd have been yet more, says Edith McConnell, had Ramshaw not fallen victim to Durham County Council's infamous Category D policy - forbidding new development - in the 1960s.

"All the families with youngsters were moved up to new houses in Evenwood or elsewhere. We lost our Sunday School at a stroke. We've tried since but there just weren't the numbers. It's really an old people's village now."

Though she was born in Ramshaw and married 47 years ago in the chapel, the McConnells have long been in Bishop Auckland - where Melvyn, the original Supermac, taught the column history at a grammar school which itself is now historic, marking its 400th anniversary this year.

They return to Ramshaw for six o'clock service almost every Sunday evening. "It's something of a mission we have," says Melvyn. "They want it to remain as long as it is possible so to do, and they give very generously towards that."

A Methodist local preacher even then, his sole lapse from Christian forbearance had come when trying to describe the porous performance of the House team goalkeeper, circa 1965. No less cack-handed, the goalkeeper turned jobbing journalist instead.

Before the service, however, he welcomes "young Michael" - keeping canny these days - hands out a couple of cough sweets to each of the faithful (he never did that in Tudors and Stuarts) and announces that the few folk of Ramshaw chapel have given £140 to Bishop Auckland Methodist circuit's tsunami appeal.

The circuit itself has raised almost £4,000, and hard to suppose which figure the more remarkable.

It's a nice little chapel, clearly cared for, a cornucopia of chrysanthemums on the window sills and by the altar and around 50 hymn books piled, a little optimistically, by the door.

For 200 years, more or less, Oh For A Thousand Tongues was number one. They relegated it, reprehensibly, to seven hundred and some such.

The organ had come from Coundon Gate Methodist church, t'other side of Bishop, when it closed 35 years ago. Though it cost a nominal £25, the expense of dismantling, transporting and reinstalling had to be met by the Ramshaw congregation.

Sarah knitted scarves and hats; her old mum made potted meat. "She made lovely potted meat," says Sarah.

The covenant service, a sort of Methodist first footing, is the only one in the Methodist year with a set order - a renewal of the pact and a reminder of the Old Testament law.

Oh For A Thousand Tongues is the second hymn - "My arm was twisted a little bit for that one," says Virginia Ramsey, the minister - accompanied by Edith McConnell on the organ, by sundry snuffles and by a susurration of cough sweets, surreptitiously being unwrapped.

It's one of those one or two gathered together occasions, a warmly convivial congregation - "there's a real feeling of worship here," says Melvyn McConnell - and a powerful, affirming sermon.

Born in Boldon Colliery, brought up in Zambia and travelled around the world, Virginia Ramsey has five churches, six cats and a dog and still pronounces "covenant" as South Tyneside folk do - as in Coventry, not government.

The service, she tells us, is a reminder of the pact between God and his people. "The joy of it is that you and I are counted in." She also tells of an overheard conversation in Marks & Spencer - "I'm not often given to earwigging other people's conversations, but sometimes it's a useful accomplishment" - when some chap had been defending his refusal to give to the Indian Ocean appeal. She wasn't impressed.

At the end we sing One More Step Along the Road I Go, and it's not many more to Villa Spice, the smart new restaurant above the Trotters Arms. The deal had been that we'd stand a very hot dinner for the curry loving minister in exchange for Oh For A Thousand Tongues, all eight verses, on the hymn list.

There'll be more of that in the Eating Owt column on Tuesday.