WHEN a Methodist talks of the plan, as Methodists do all the time, it must not be confused with the Grand Plan. The lesser plan appears every quarter, lists the churches in a district and those appointed week by week to lead services there and has more squiggles and symbols than Bradshaw's railway timetable.

The Grand Plan takes a little longer.

On Sunday, someone produced a Crook district plan from exactly 50 years previously. There were three ministers. Amid the colliery communities to the north of Crook were two chapels at Tow Law - Hill Crest, Wesley - others at Sunniside, Mount Pleasant, Wooley Terrace, Roddymoor and Billy Row - or to appropriate its Sunday name, Billy Row Green.

All but Wooley Terrace and Billy Row had closed in the seismic half century which followed. On Sunday they held the last service at Billy Row.

It was a brave and an upbeat occasion, though the moist eyes could not entirely be attributed to menthol and eucalyptus - overpowering from three pews distant - nor the handkerchiefs to hay fever.

In a sense, it was also like attending the funeral of an old miner whose contemporaries had long since pre-deceased him.

The chapel was opened in 1859, the early registers in both English and Welsh to embrace the incoming workforce. In the rabbit warren rooms out the back are still a cupboard marked Rechabites, a confident picture of the Band of Hope, an early photograph of the chapel pioneers.

Within memory, happy memory, they talked of sitting on the window sills because every bench overflowed, of the choir tiered almost literally to the rafters, of anniversary and harvest homecoming and of rousing Methodists like Billy Butterfield and Bob Clemmitt, who was station master at Crook and finished in charge of Liverpool Street.

Now, only 15 or so attended on Sunday mornings, the old place crumbling and the congregation no longer able to sustain it. Even the front door was peeling, though no longer in need of paint.

The irony, of course, was that the biggest Sunday morning gathering for years was the one that came to say farewell.

Back where he began, the last rite is led by the Rev Harold Moore, now retired and living in Darlington but still, indelibly, on the plan.

"Is this what the propagandists call rationalisation?" we ask before the service.

"I think it's called retrenchment," says Mr Moore.

He was born half a mile away to one of six Methodist families among the 11 homes in Low Albion Terrace, contracted TB when he was four, spent much of his childhood in a sanatorium and is still restricted ("a butterfly with a broken wing") by what then they called TB hip. Canny wicket keeper they reckon, though.

There, too, are 93-year-old Elsie Jewell - having outlived the chapel into which first she carried to be baptised - Lesley Moreland, who is Billy Butterfield's daughter, and Hilary Amstrong, the new Government Chief Whip, whose MP father was long a Methodist local preacher in those parts. We hear readings from Jeremiah ("I will bring you back to this place") and from the Epistle to the Romans - the familiar passage about nothing separating us from the love of God. We sing Now Thank We All Our God and Blessed Assurance and listen to a moving testimony from chapel steward Richard Morris.

"The decision we have taken was a clear one, I don't think that anyone thought there was any other option but there is still a sense of guilt and of failure, that maybe we have let down the people who founded this place.

"They were called to build this chapel and we are called to leave it now. We go out with heavy hearts but with a spirit of trust and confidence in God."

David Armstrong, whose father had been headmaster at Billy Row school, offers the prayer that Wooley Terrace might alone go on in "God's own country".

Harold Moore had sung in the choir - "the choirmaster had an awful job, hardly any of us could read music" - known men who toiled in 18 inch seams, been converted in Billy Row chapel in 1952, tried valiantly to be cheerful as he marked its end.

"Maybe the tide has gone out for a while on this shore, but I tell you that on other shores the tide is coming in.

"May none of us give the devil the pleasure of seeing long faces and joyless hearts."

Half way through he dramatically removes his jacket, as the present Prime Minister might have done; near the end - whilst praying for the building and for the village "that seemingly has turned its face against the cause of Christ" - his voice becomes tremulous and, briefly, there are tears.

We sing Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and God is Working His Purpose Out...the Grand Plan takes a little longer.