Turning points

These days Tesco gets Nowhere, in particular.

It’s west of the A68, near Toft Hill, and for non-drivers must be accessed by foot. The last bus to Wind Mill left around 1930, which must on no account be confused with half past seven.

It’s a timelessly delightful spot, known as Pit Green until the 1860s, now home to fewer than 50 people and to one of the loveliest little Methodist chapels in Christendom.

It was there last Wednesday that we hoofed for the annual concert by Aycliffe and Brancepeth Band – not just for the music, though they’re brilliant – but to see how the chapel ladies might interpret the advertised “light supper”.

Wind Mill bakes for Britain. A great spread overflows two trestle tables out the back. “That’s just for the band,” says Hazel Gaskill.

Whatever the band calls it – the feeding of the five thousand, probably – the chapel ladies call it a cup of tea.

Admission, including the luminously light supper, is £4. The chapel’s so small that even if everyone pays, and nothing to suppose that they haven’t, they’re barely going to be into three figures. There’s also a raffle, with prizes of what might be termed a sober disposition.

I win a box of tea bags.

For the bandsmen at the front it’s a bit like one of those attempts on getting foolish folk into a phone box, the record presently 16 and held by bairns in Banffshire.

That the trombone section isn’t decapitating those in front must be assumed a triumph of slide rule precision.

That the euphoniums are squeezed somehow into the pulpit, the text above their heads urging “Love ye one another”, seems almost an act of God.

“It’s the perfect place for a band concert,” says Keith Phipps, Bishop Auckland’s superintendent minister.

“The only neighbours are cows”.

The band are clearly enjoying themselves, too. Mike Priestley, energetic conductor and music teacher at Staindrop school, even essays a joke – neither a mucky joke nor a particularly Methodist joke – about Pat and Mick buying near-identical horses at Bishop market. You know the one.

They play everything from Beatles to British Grenadiers, from Lilliburlero to Lone Ranger to Lucy in the Sky. They finish, tumultuously, shortly after 9pm, after which everyone consumes a further 30 minutes doing justice to the light supper.

They do say, of course, that what goes around comes around, but at Wind Mill, just occasionally, it’s wonderful when time simply stands still.

LILLIBURLERO’S spelling had to be checked on the Internet.

The search proved serendipitous.

The tune, written by Henry Purcell, may best be known as the signature for the BBC World Service.

The words were by Thomas Wharton, the song said to have “rhymed King James II out of England”.

Thomas’s father was Philip Lord Wharton, much featured hereabouts as a major 17th Century landowner in Swaledale and benefactor of a charity to provide what still are known as Wharton Bibles.

To earn one, Sunday School children had to recite by heart Psalms 1, 15, 25, 37, 101, 113 and 145. June Luckhurst in Ingleton, near Darlington, still has that won in 1924 by John George Hodgson, her father – and still reads from it in chapel.

Philip had himself been imprisoned in the Tower by James II in 1675. His son’s lyrics may be considered vengeful:

There was an old prophecy found in a bog
Lilliburlero bullen a la
The country’d be ruled by an ass and a dog
Lilliburlero bullen a la.

So it goes on, all about Irish politics.

These columns have several times followed the steep and rugged pathway up Swaledale for the annual service at Philip’s Smarber chapel, but we’re going nowhere near Irish politics.

BACK up the A68 on Saturday afternoon for the beer festival at the terraced, half-hidden Black Lion, in Wolsingham, said to be Weardale’s oldest pub – licensed, it’s believed, since 1690 – but still one to which directions had to be sought.

The lady was incredulous. “A pub in County Durham that you’ve never even heard of…?”

The first real talking point, however, was the water. Sara-Jane Stobbs, the perky landlady, doesn’t sell it.

“The tap water around here is so lovely, why should I rip people off by selling the bottled stuff?” she said.

Her sausage pie, £1.50, was pretty much a give-away, too.

The other talking point was the ale from the Black Paw Brewery, newly on stream in Bishop Auckland and run by Phil Whitfield, 47, who hitherto had been assistant director of strategic intelligence (no less) at the Tees NHS Primary Care Trust.

So how strategic was it, and how intelligent in a crowded and diminishing market, to give up a highlypaid job to run a one-man brewery?

“I’d had quite a few successes in changing things locally, but it had got to the point where things were going round and round again,” he says. “Mr Brown put millions into the NHS and we didn’t spend it very wisely. I thought it was time to go; I didn’t want to be earning money under false pretences.

“It feels like I’m an 18-year-old again, boys and their toys really. I’ve had more fun in the past six months than I’ve had in the past 20 years. I was in a pension trap at the NHS and you can end up doing a job for the wrong reasons. It’s been strategically intelligent for my mental health, definitely.”

He was born in Kent, spent seven years as a Royal Navy radio operator, now lives in Tudhoe, near Spennymoor.

The brewery’s in Westgate Road, just behind Bishop Auckland’s main shopping street. The Bishops Best is a truly excellent, rather red bitter; the Paw’s Gold was much appreciated by the lady. Much else is planned, including fruit beers.

“Any market can be created if the product is of consistently high quality.

I’ve had an excellent response so far. I know I can’t take on the really big brewers but I still have children at school, I still have to make a living out of this.

“There’s a real buzz about being in a bar and someone ordering your beer, even better if they come back for a second.”

He’d also gained an MSc degree, with a dissertation entitled “Is too much change bad for your health?”.

Mr PA Whitfeld raises a glass, more than half-full, to himself. “It could have been the first one-word dissertation in history,” he says.