Redcar beach, 5.30am, Sunday. Originally these Easter risings were billed "Sunrise Services" until experience triumphed over hope - meteorologically, at any rate - and they became Dawn Services, instead.

The town, even Silks exotically-dancing nightclub, has gone home to bed. The Las Vegas amusement emporium ("Mature staff wanted: minimum wage paid") sleeps like two fat ladies, a solitary reveller meanders in search of the morning after.

Like Easter, the passing number 29 bus cannot so easily be explained, but is real enough for all that.

On the belt and bracing beach, 18 members of Stokesley Methodist Church are assembled, bright and early but still a bit late to catch John Wesley. The founder, 12 times a visitor to Stokesley, would have done half a shift by now.

At 72, he put down his continued good health to rising each day at 4am and preaching at five. After Stokesley, his journal records, he preached at Guisborough at midday, Robin Hood's Bay in the evening and at 3.30 next morning was off on his horse for an early service in Scarborough, before heading, in a heatwave, for York.

The deeds of Stokesley's first chapel, indeed, provided for its use only by John and Charles Wesley and their nominees and, after their death, those appointed by the Methodist Conference "provided they preach in the House one evening in every week and at five o'clock each morning following."

House rules, as it were.

We meet on Redcar Stray, as in waif, the litter strewn sward from which on other festive occasions folk take their Boxing Day diploma. A mother clutches her children to her, the hardier hunt for snails, an elderly gentleman recounts that his first wife's grandfather worked at The Echo, too.

"Name of Brown," he says. "Perhaps you knew him."

Though the mood is buoyant, risen indeed, there is no sign of the sun. "There never is in Redcar," someone says, unkindly.

Whilst the column is an old stager on these Easter parades - Pen Hill, Black Hambleton, Captain Cook's monument at Great Ayton among more recent reveilles - for Stokesley's Methodists it's only the second. Last year they topped Carlton Bank, astride the Lyke Wake Walk, would have been there again had foot-and-mouth not darkened their pilgrim path.

Dressed like Nanook of the North-East, Richard Bradshaw, Stokesley's minister since September, leads the 25 minute service, appropriately on the theme of darkness into light. Periodically, he looks over his shoulder towards the sea, as if expecting the sun to emerge and ask if he minds if it joins us.

"The long night is passed," we acclaim. "All you that sleep, awake."

Though another four or five now stand curiously on the little cliff top, Redcar seems generally oblivious to the exhortation. Richard delivers a short address on where not to look for Christ - "not where he has been, but ahead of us" - the service ends with Thine be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son.

As if on cue, as if someone has called it on the homophone - a homophone, it will be recalled, is a word which sounds like another but has different spelling and meaning altogether - the sun rises magnificently from behind an unequal bank of cloud.

The photographer (bless him) early turns somersaults, the dawn chorus little less ecstatic. Thine be the Glory isn't just Christendom's greatest hymn, but its greatest homophone, too.

Most go down cautiously to look at the sea, as if to wish it a joyous Easter; none sticks a toe in the water.

Afterwards, there is a splendid breakfast back at Stokesley church hall, most of us - though not the poor minister - re-starting the day on cereal, grapefruit, scrambled egg and bacon, toast and coffee.

Mr Bradshaw is not only on a sponsored slim that holds fast beyond Lent, but is also a vegetarian, a decision made to support his daughter when she was 12.

He had a friend, he recalls, who was both vegetarian and Liberal MP. "Those who like sausages or who have respect for the law might change their minds if they saw how both were made," the friend was given to observe. His daughter, now ten years older, has softened her stance, however. "Fallen among cavers," muses Richard, cheerfully, over his cornflakes.

The long table is set with Easter daffodils. The church - handsome, barrel roofed, manifestly cared for - still more gloriously arrayed.

Stokesley has had four chapels since the 1760s, the first too small to hold Wesley's wide awake club, the second built in 1812. Cost of painting the chapel front was four shillings, cost of beer and porter at the opening - this was Methodism's less abstemious era - four shillings and sixpence.

The present building was erected in 1887 on the site of the demolished Black Swan pub, the cost of just over £5,000 augmented by £3,040 from William Mewburn and three guineas from "dear Herbert in heaven". Its predecessor was in turn replaced by a brewery, Chapel Yard becoming Brewery Yard.

"This was no doubt upsetting to many people at the time, but we can now perhaps regard it as an appropriate quid pro quo for the conversion of the old inn into a chapel," writes T Berry in The Methodist Chapels of Stokesley.

His frugal breakfast over, the present minister is off to prepare for the principal Easter worship, the latecomers' service, some might say, at 9.30am. John Wesley would have been half way to Seaton Carew, or somewhere.

Outside, squally clouds scuttle over the stirring High Street. It's 7.45am; we have had the best of the Day.