#bellringing

Bellringing! Knitting! Music according to the physical constraints of the instrument! Mathematical craft patterns!

English church bells are rung by teams of people, one person per bell in a room underneath the bell chamber itself. The bells are very big and heavy - the smallest one I've personally rung was a bit under 100kg, I haven't kept track of the largest but I expect it was somewhere north of 500kg, bells exist which are several tonnes. As the bell swings on its wheel you have some ability to speed it up or slow it down (or pause altogether) but not by a huge amount - so when a group of bells 12345678 rings in sequence, the group of ringers can only change the sequence a little bit at a time by swapping some neighbouring pairs of bells, eg 21436587.

This means you can't ring tunes, really, but you can ring complex braided patterns with hundreds of rows and no repeats. And you can interpret that as a cable knitting chart. So in autumn 2023 I spent seven weeks knitting the method Bristol Surprise Major in sock yarn on 2.5mm needles, for a final length of approximately 3 metres or 1792 rows plus border.

The bell picked out in red is bell 1, the treble. It performs the same pattern each time, 32 "changes" long. The other seven bells make the same set of cable crossings each time but they start and finish in different places, thus each one moves through the work of each other bell. Bell 8 (the tenor) is picked out in blue yarn - for the first "lead" it starts in 8th place (brown line on the digital chart) and finishes in 6th place, for the second lead it starts in 6th (turquoise) and finishes in 4th, etc.. After seven leads it is back to 8th place so that is a "plain course" of 224 changes.

Hello! I'm just about to ring and frankly this bit is pretty easy (in theory, takes a bit longer to do in practice) so let's make it quick.

Bell is ringing!! Yipee!!

Speed up? Sure! Take in rope/come up your rope/shorten your rope, and the many other ways ringers will tell you the same thing. This means: bring your hands up the tail end (rope part that you're holding) by a little bit.

When your hands go up for the backstroke, there's less rope for the bell to use to swing with, your body is keeping it from going that bit further up, so it doesn't swing as far, ringing faster. You also grab the sally higher up, which does the same thing. Don't let that bell get to the balance point!

Slow down? Hell yeah. Let out rope, move hands down tail end so bell has more space to swing, and get up to that balance point to linger. Catch sally slightly slower, and on both strokes be careful not to let it bump the stay because it'll come down pretty fast and that's not what we're trying to do here! Taking notes? Don't! You can't read them while ringing.

Now, you're probably not asking yourself what Rounds is, but I'm going to tell you anyway! Let's give all the bells a number. Lightest bell, highest pitch, is number 1. Each heavier bell gets a higher number. Remember this, it's about to come up a lot.

We're gonna assume our fictional bell tower has 6 bells. So our heaviest, lowest pitch bell is number 6.

In rounds, bells ring in this order:

123456

Descending scale!! That's it. This is where everything starts from. You follow the bell that rings just before you, and make small adjustments to your ringing speed to hopefully fit in just behind them.

And this repeats, again and again, until it doesn't. That's rounds, baby!