I've been doing a bit of online ringing again. Last Friday I called a quarter of Lincolnshire Royal, using the standard simple composition W 3H sW and discovering that it makes 5-6 ring all the positions. Today we rang Cambridge, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire spliced, using a composition in whole courses...

I was fortunate enough to find another person who wanted to work with place notation and someone with experience who was willing and had the required patience to guide us. Thank you, Elaine & Hamish!  Progress might have been more rapid if there’d been 2 people with high competence, but...

At this point I decided to re-visit Kent Treble Bob Minor, hoping to use it to improve the skill of rapidly and reliably knowing my bells’ places. I had never previously succeeded in getting the Kent Places secure but other than these, Kent is plain hunt patterns with dodges as...

Normally we organise handbell days twice per year, in May and October, with a combination of quarter peals and practice sessions. We've missed the last three because of the pandemic, but yesterday we restarted with a small-scale event involving 12 people.

The morning focused on getting our three new Glasgow...

Last week we had a live ringing session with Jessica, who we have been teaching in Ringing Room. We spent some time working on handbell ringing style and adapting to the delay between starting the physical movement and the bell sounding. After an evening's practice we were pretty well up...

This was clearly a major element of my barrier and needed work.  In my early days of tower bell ringing, like most, I would count my places, but this skill has long since retired. If I try to do it now, I very quickly lose concentration and forget. Instead, I...

I have learned very many new methods for peals on tower bells and it was so frustrating to find my skills seemed no use in hand.  I considered the skills I use when learning a new method:

• Learn the place bell order.
• Create, then condense a verbal description of the...

This week I have been ringing every day since Sunday! Not all handbells, but still, it's been a long time since such an intensive week. Sunday and Tuesday were in the tower, but all the rest were handbells.

On Monday we had a second attempt at the peal of 4-spliced...

From time to time we have tried to encourage other ringers to use our blog to write about their progress, or how they overcame certain obstacles, and in general share their experience of learning to ring handbells. 

When we started this blog in 2011, neither Simon or I were at...

I learned the basics of change ringing in hand in the 1970s at university.  Since then, I’ve had a couple of spells of trying to progress further and prior to March 2020 had rung a total of 6 peals (Plain Bob Minor/Major on 1-2 and inside pairs) and 41 quarter...