A Skill for Life
Once gained, bell ringing is a skill for life you’ll never forget and can open up a lifetime of experiences and enjoyment. New ringers follow the ‘Learning The Ropes’ programme to learn to ring, led by instructors accredited by the Association of Ringing Teachers. There are five stages from beginner to experienced ringer.
Level 1 - Bell Handling
The first stage in learning to ring is to develop the skills to ‘handle’ the bell. That means the technique to control the bell on your own. This is done on a one-to-one basis with your instructor and is often done on a silenced bell. You will usually be taught each of the two movements, or ‘strokes’, separately and then helped to put them together. The technique is all about holding the rope correctly, moving with it and catching the rope at the right place and time.
Level 2 – Foundation skills
Bell ringing is all about working as part of a team, so once you can ‘handle’ your bell you are quickly introduced to ringing with the rest of the ‘band’ of ringers. The key skills learnt are the ability to watch and listen to the ringing to know when you pull and sound your bell and to be able to varying the pace of your ringing to fit in with the group.
Level 3 – Introduction to Change Ringing
For over 350 years bellringers have ‘run the changes’ by varying the sequence in which the bells ring, and various set patterns have been developed. At Level 2 you will have developed the skills to enable you to start to ring these patterns, at Level 3 we will introduce you to ‘plain hunting’ which is the basic building block of many of these set patterns, known as ‘methods’. You will also ring your first externed period of ringing – a ‘quarter peal’, which will take about 45 minutes.
Level 4 - Novice Change Ringer
Having mastered plain hunting, you will then move on to ring your first method on an ‘working’ bell, where the pattern is a little more complex, although not to difficult to learn.
Level 5 – Become an experienced bell ringer
Once you have grasped the key skills of change ringing, there are more complicated patterns of methods to learn and also variations to existing ones you know. There is a world of opportunity to learn new things, and using the clever approach bell ringers have to memorise the pattern it is not even too difficult!