The week before last we were away on the annual "Hulliday", a big group of ringers with families who have been going on holiday together for a few years. These days the holiday doesn't involve much ringing (the amount of running is increasing steadily), but there is usually some handbell...
On Wednesday we followed up on a promise from the recent handbell day, by getting Peter Kirton from St Andrews to come to Albany Quadrant for a peal of Yorkshire. Satisfyingly, we succeeded first time, scoring quite a decent peal. Of course we would like to ring more peals...
... in every sense. We went for a peal with Mike and Ian on Wednesday, and found it surprisingly tricky; so much so that we didn't score. It emphasised the fact that the familiar Cambridge work above the treble is a huge advantage in Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Rutland. We...
BellBoard addicts might already have noticed that Henry Pipe has rung Norman Smith's 23-spliced on handbells. This is a tremendous achievement, all the more so at the age of 13. I had the pleasure of ringing one part for practice, with Henry, David Pipe and Alex Byrne, on our holiday last...
How far apart do they get? That's often considered a factor in estimating the difficulty of a particular pair in a method. It explains the experience that ringing the slow work is the most difficult aspect of Kent on the tenors. Following on from Tina's recent article about the features...
Next month's peal with the Edinburgh crossover band is going to be Superlative. It has interesting possibilities for handbell-friendly compositions, because the 24 courses with 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 all coursing are mutually true. These are the coursing orders of the form xxyy2, xx2yy, 2xxyy where xx can be 34...
We're doing well with the "Edinburgh crossover band" - we rang a peal of Lincolnshire last month, using one of the rotated William Barton compositions. Last week we rang Rutland. What was the composition? Rutland isn't a particularly popular method on handbells (in fact last week's peal was my...
As well as our long-established band with Jonathan and Angela, we have been ringing with the "Edinburgh crossover band" involving Mike and Ian. We are trying to get into a routine of a monthly peal attempt. Towards the end of last year we scored a peal of Yorkshire, and in...
To return to our Horton's Four project, we decided to ring a quarter of each method individually. I have written several articles about handbell-friendly compositions, but Horton's Four is an extreme example of ringing an ordinary composition (actually its difficulty makes it far from ordinary) on handbells, so I decided...
Double methods are those in which the frontwork is the backwork upside down. This means that the line of the method has rotational symmetry: it looks the same if rotated by 180 degrees about the point at which it passes the treble in the central position of the change (4-5...