Chris Edmondson (Chair of Council) offers this poem wirtten by Tim Ashworth - a former Scargill House chaplain - at the time of the closure of the House last year, with a growing sense of its prophetic edge..

Untitled for Scargill

Even heaven a little bit is weeping
    a droplet  falls
        for love's labours lost and dying

Undergrowth has overgrown
    and buried fertile vision
        but there is yet hope

Do not forget the gift
    do not forget the grace
        do not forget the glory
    for I Am is God of all these
        and does not sanction death
        until its time has come

Rusted gates they may not yet become
    but gates of splendour
        letting in the pilgrim travellers
    up springtime, daffodil bordered road

The winter of our discontent may pass
    and make a way for re-incarnation
        the life again enfleshed
    in sparkling new form

Can these stones live?
    the question rings out
You know, O Lord
    comes the reply

These rooms, this land will yet cry out
    we hope, we pray

For there is one
    who makes things new
        and moves us on and in
    to bigger, brighter, fuller day.