It was a real joy, yesterday, to take advantage of the Christmas relaxation of the rules – and to sound out joyfully for Christmas.
Bells across the country sounded out together and we rang at 6.00pm, albeit just with five bells. That is the maximum we can ring whilst maintaining social distancing regulations.
Theresa, one of our ringers who wasn’t ringing yesterday, took some video footage.
See it here!
The tentative first steps into Ringing Room have begun to develop into something a good deal more solid – and the average age of the ringers has taken a decided plummet!
With a good deal of help from Jane and Jenny, the practice has become focused on our younger ringers – and has shown the special joy of “remote ringing” because we’ve been joined by three people from Deepest Wales! They comprise Sara, an accomplished ringer who has no easy access to any ringing locally – and two of her children – who have only ever had a passing glimpse of a bell tower.
So we seem to be meeting regularly with eight or nine each week – and we’r dividing our time between Plain Bob, one or two “different” minimus methods (fewer bells make for easier ringing!) – and some tune ringing as well.
Just five of us gathered and by the end of the session we had managed three leads of Bob Doubles. Of course, this was a “virtual meeting” which, once we had ironed out the conference software, worked well.
It’s really hard to ring without all of the external prompts and clues that we’re so used to – but that difficulty is, I suspect, a great deal of the value of this. As we get more used to counting places, we’ll get better and better at this!
Everyone reckoned to come back next week – so it can’t have been all pain…
Following four months of sad silence, we will soon be making a joyful noise to summon folk to church. True, it’ll just be four bells – but it’s a start!
A few of us have been feeding our habit, using some software called Ringing R oom. It is a lot of fun – but it fair makes the brain ache! And it’s not, really, what we come to the tower for.
The advice is now that we can ring for services only – and under some quite specific restrictions. We’ll be following these!
There is a .pdf with some specific advice that may inform ringers about what we’re trying to achieve and to help you to decide whether or not to take part. Download it here.
There are several things that we can do to keep the Bell Ringing Brain Cell in action. One of these is to play with some worksheets. These will appear irregulary from time to time.
Find them here: Some Resources (or on the menu above).
The latest one is out today. It introduces Place Notation, a cunning way to condense a complicated method into a single line!
Do let me know if you find them useful, interesting, boring, incomplete – or whatever.
What a pity – I had hoped to run a once-a-month quarter peal attempt this year. We scored one in January and another in February, but, even when we get back to our Yorkshire Tail Ends, it’ll be a while before some of our band get back up to speed for their attempts. Well done, though, to first Angus and then George, each of whom rang good quarters.
Frankly, the opening piece of their entry in the Skipton Music Festival 2020 lacked a certain degreee of… well, pretty well everything! In hindsight, they should have stopped and restarted. However, they rang Bobby Shafto better than I’ve ever heard them. Judging these things is always a subjective thing, but we were all delighted when we heard that we had won our class!
We knew that one of the Kildwick teams would win the change ringing class – our 
three teams were the only entries! In the event, the “MidiRingers” were judged to be the best, though another judge could just as validly chosen the “MicroRingers”, or even the whole band “MiniRingers”. I still think that, as a spectacle, changes on twelve bells take a lot of beating.
The Kildwick Foundry trophies were awarded for the very first time this year, so – whatever happens, the MiniRingers’ name will head the list on the oak plinth.
