Although the decision is pretty academic for the Kildwick MiniRingers, there will be no Skipton Music Festival this year – and so no chance to defend the two trophies that they won last year.

Even if the Festival had gone ahead, it would almost certainly have been for solo performances only. And, anyway, we can’t meet to rehearse!

Last year’s Festival got through by the skin of its teeth, Lockdown 1 being announced as it drew to a close.  Let us hope and pray that the centenary celebrations of 2022 will be able to go ahead.

Happy Christmas to you all!

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!

We met – a few of us – and rang together!

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…

Ringing advice

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.