St Cuthbert-by-the-Ferry · Tuesday Practice, 7.30
A plain course of Plain Bob Minor — sixty changes on the six, and not one of them repeated until the very last, when the bells fall back into rounds like people sitting down after a long standing ovation.
Nobody comes up the tower stairs for the music, exactly. The music is a side effect. What we come for is the arithmetic made physical: six bells, six ringers, and a rule that says no bell may move more than one place from where it stood the blow before. Everything else — the whole beautiful machinery of it — falls out of that single rule, the way a whole cathedral falls out of the decision to make an arch.
Start in rounds: 1 2 3 4 5 6, treble down to tenor, a descending scale, the sound of a village at rest. Then swap in pairs. Then swap again, differently. Keep going and you will not get back to rounds for sixty changes, and when you do it will feel — I promise you this — like walking in your own front door.
Below is that course, ringing. Pull off, follow a bell with your eye, and watch it climb to the back and hunt down again. Ringers draw the shape of one bell's journey and call it the blue line. Learning a method means learning a line the way you learn a tune: not as a list of instructions but as a road you have driven so often you could do it in the dark. Which, on winter Tuesdays with the light on the blink, you sometimes have to.
Tap a bell to follow it. The treble stays red — she is the one you listen for, always.
Five leads of twelve changes. Read each column downwards; the last row of one lead is the first row of the next. The bell you are following is drawn in blue, the treble in red. Every lead you will see the treble do exactly the same thing — plain hunt, up to the back and down again — while your bell gets shuffled one notch along at each lead end, until it has taken all five turns and come home.
A row is a queue. 3 1 5 2 6 4 means the third bell strikes first, then the treble, then the fifth, and so on down to the fourth bell at the back. Six strikes, evenly spaced, about a quarter-second apart, and then the next row begins — except at handstroke, where we leave a gap the width of one bell. That gap is called an open handstroke lead and it is the difference between ringing and merely striking. It is the breath in the sentence.
The tenor at the back gives the pulse. Everyone else hangs off her. If you can hear the tenor and count to six you can, in principle, do this. In practice you will spend your first month rope-burned and apologising, and then one Tuesday it will simply happen, and you will not be able to explain to anyone at home what it was that happened.
Ring of six, cast 1783 and 1846, rehung on ball bearings 1968. Tenor 11 cwt 2 qr 4 lb in F. The fourth has a hairline no one can hear and everyone can feel.
Here is the part that gets people. The method is not a piece of music somebody composed; it is a rule applied over and over, and the rule runs out. Five leads of twelve, and the pattern has exhausted every arrangement it is allowed to reach and has no choice but to return. You do not steer it home. You just keep your place, and home arrives.
There is a longer version — six thousand changes, three and a half hours, no stopping, no music in front of you — and people ring it for weddings and for funerals and for the fun of having done it. But the plain course is the whole idea in miniature, sixty rows long, and you can hold it in your head on the bus. That is what we love about it. It is a very large thing folded small enough to carry.