Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath precerd to the roote …..
Thane longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ….
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Reddynge they wende
The joyous handbelle ringinge for so seke
That them wyth joye hath fill’d...

Here is a summary of handbell ringing activity for March 2014, based on performances published on Bell Board. The most notable thing this month was how much handbell ringing was going on in March!  Excellent stuff - more of the same please.   We also noticed in the past couple...

Somehow I have only just noticed that Graham John's web site has several recordings of handbell ringing. They are extracts from peals, in a variety of methods on different numbers of bells, including some record lengths. All of the ringing is excellent - in fact you have to listen...

On Saturday we had the annual Scottish Association training day, at which I was running a Bristol group at Dunblane. At Angela's suggestion I took the mini-bells, and although we didn't have time to do any ringing during the day, we did get them out in the pub after...

Here is a summary of handbell ringing activity for February 2014, based on performances published on Bell Board.  In doing the roundup I look at all lengths, since for any growing handbell band, peals only tell a small part of the story.

First some significant milestones.....

• John Jelley has...

A few thoughts based on our experiences.

• Not enough people. We don't have a large pool of ringers to draw on, so it's difficult to get a 12-bell band together often enough to be able to steadily improve from session to session. In our Kent Maximus attempt last Saturday, Nick...

Last week started well on Sunday with a quarter of Primrose in the tower, and continued well on Monday with a date touch of 8-spliced. The date touch was a textbook operation: we sat down, started ringing, continued until the end, and stopped. Some of the leads of London...

Here is a quick roundup of the handbell highlights in January 2014.  My source for these is The Ringing World's Bell Board.  I'll be developing this as the year goes on, so suggestions and comments are very welcome, and if you have a performance you would like to see...

Well, maybe not. But in our continuing 8-spliced project, we decided that these are the methods we need more practice at, so we rang them in a quarter with a nice palindromic six-part composition:

1344 Spliced Surprise Major (4m)
Simon J Gay
   2345678
----------
S  5738264
P- 7864523
B- 6784523...

Another piece of my early handbell ringing history has fallen away with the death of Edward W Martin last year on 18 November.  As extensive tributes from the North America Guild of Change Ringers show (see www.nagcr.org), Eddie and his wife Ann were hugely influential in early years of the...