After 125 years, the folk of Wooley Terrace chapel will soon congregate for the final time.

SAVE for the fact that there’s not six feet of snow on the ground – and that may only be a matter of time – it might be considered a fairly typical November morning on Stanley Hill Top.

The rain sloshes from saturnine Sabbath skies. The breeze bowls along Windy Ridge and, finding nothing to resist it, perversely redoubles its efforts.

Safe inside Wooley Terrace Methodist chapel, they greet one another stoically. “Turned out nice again,” they say. “Canny morning,”

they say. “What have you come by, boat?” they say.

It may not be supposed wild and Wooley, however, Locals rhyme it with “duly”, or with “unruly.”

Behind the bonhomie, beyond the Reverend Ann Shepherdson’s cheery greeting that they have a song in their hearts and much to celebrate, lies a significant sadness, nonetheless.

Wooley Terrace, both a pristine-perfect village chapel and a living reminder of different days, holds its final service next Saturday after 125 years. It’s going to be a very sad occasion, and for few more than Marjorie Nicholson.

Born in Stanley, she also attended the little chapel at Sunniside, the chapels down the hill at Billy Row and at Roddymoor and when one by one they also fell by the wayside became a regular at Wooley Terrace.

The column had attended Billy Row’s closure in 2001, recalled all the other village chapels that once sustained a predominantly mining area.

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

Marjorie Nicholson recalls that a former minister had called her the Dr Beeching of Methodism. “Everywhere I went it closed down. Now this one’s going, too. You can’t believe how things change.”

The analogy of rabbits in a cornfield comes reluctantly to mind. It is not what they mean by harvest festival.

IT’S the Stanley above Crook, in County Durham, known sometimes as Mount Pleasant and not to be confused. Once it was a pit village, a real community, 102 terraced houses between the colliery at one end of Wooley Terrace and the chapel at the other.

Now it’s not so much a village, more a collection of houses. Of the 14-or-so regular attenders – 14 on a good morning, they concede – only two are from Stanley.

“I wonder because it’s a Songs of Praise if we might get a few more?”

says someone, drip-drying, at the back.

“If they’ll not turn out on a fine morning,” says his friend, “they’ll not turn out on this ’un.”

The pub’s gone, the post office is gone, the proud little football club – they of the Little House on the Prairie – is gone. Sheep graze there now. Marjorie Nicholson, her late father United’s long-serving secretary, reels off all the shops.

“Two Co-ops, a Walter Willson’s, two fish shops, a cobbler’s, a draper’s, a general dealer’s, a little sweet shop.” Now Stanley has no shops, not a single counter-attraction.

The chapel, much loved and bright burnished, reflects how things were.

There’s a stained glass window funded by the teachers and scholars of Wooley Terrace Sunday School, another by Margaret Collingwood and her Juveniles – these days the word “juvenile” is usually followed by “delinquent”.

Many more windows are in loving memory. A flower stand carries an inscription to Nellie Birkbeck, for 50 years a Sunday school teacher. Now there’s not even a Sunday school, nor hardly a soul under 70.

Jenny Paxton, 89, has attended all her life, recalls the Temperance Club, the dances – “I still can’t dance, mind” – and was one of the Juveniles, too.

“We were a concert party, Margaret was the schoolmaster’s daughter. The Sunday school used to fill the chapel, little ones in the first two rows and for some reason known as the Tablets, the rest of the boys and girls behind There was a choir, everything.”

Numbers have again fallen in the past year. The heating needs renewing and they haven’t the money.

Brenda Worthington, who moved to Stanley three years ago to run the post office –“then the Government closed it” – recalls a warm welcome, nonetheless.

“I’ve been a Methodist all my life but never been made more at home than here. It’s very disturbing that so many chapels have gone. They’ll come for funerals but that’s all.”

Doreen Ainsley, 46 years at Wooley Terrace, talks of the inevitability.

“We can go to other places to worship, most of us will, but there’ll never be anywhere quite like this.”

RATHER more than the average, 20 or 21, are present for the songs of praise. Bless them, they’ve baked. “There are some lovely hymns,” we’re assured – appropriate, too.

The first’s Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, Pilgrim Thorough This Barren Land. Stanley’s by no means barren, but on such a morning looks a mite bleak for all that.

The second’s Will Your Anchor Hold? Judging by the sound of the rain, it may have to.

Though Morning Has Broken seems not to be on the playlist, they also sing One More Step Along the World I Turn, with the chorus about travelling from the old things to the new.

“I think that’s very appropriate to where we are at present,” says Brenda.

They may travel trepidantly, nonetheless.

■ The final service at Wooley Terrace Methodist chapel is at 2.30pm next Saturday.