Church bells

[Isxmasoveryet]

Am i being unreasonable to think churches should not be aloud to ring those damn bells for hours on end a few times a week it not very christain disturbing neighbours etc for several hours

The church was there probably before your house was even built.
You're being extremely unreasonable.
There is a church opposite my house, it ding dongs merrily away on a Sunday morning, a Thursday evening for practice and random times for weddings and funerals.
After a couple of weeks, I never noticed them any more, even with my windows open.
So yes, you're being extremely unreasonable.

It's near-impossible to ring recognisable tunes on church bells (unless it is a carillon, which is a rather different set-up). They're so heavy that the most you can do is slow them down or speed them up slightly, so effectively you can only "move" your bell's ring one place in any given sequence - e.g if you ring 4th on one round, you can ring 5th or 3rd in the next one, but not second or sixth. To add to the complications, there will be an interval between the rope being pulled and the bell actually ringing, because it is fixed to a wheel and it is actually the wheel that is being turned.

This was allegedly on a Sunday. Practice sessions are during the week, partly in preparation for Sunday services.

And it can't have happened on the Sunday morning, because then there would be ringing all the way through church services which no vicar would put up with.

OP does not suggest that the bells she is talking about were ringing overnight. They seem to be a peal of bells being rung by bellringers, not the chimes of a clock.

I really don't believe you about the 6 continuous hours on New Year's Day. As I've pointed out, ringers just don't have the strength and stamina to do that at any time, let alone after seeing the New Year in.

But OP isn't.

Not if they're having practice sessions during the week as OP claims.

Our local bellrings could not be any worse at getting any sort of of melody / tune whatever you call music from bells. I imagine they are all quite drunk and having a laugh. They practice 3 times a week and have not got any better. The people who ring the bells for weddings know how to make the bells sound great, not sure how they manage to go from one extreme to the other. Booze and having a bloody good laugh is the only explanation, I may join them!

@Isatis our bell ringing practice regularly goes for 4 hours, ending at 10pm on a weeknight.

Do bell ringers actually have to practice once or twice a week or is it just a fun activity for them? I get they might have to practice occasionally but it sounds like it's more about doing a fun activity with friends.

I think it sounds like a lot of bell ringers don't care about their neighbours and feel they have the right to make a lot of noise. No one is denying that church bells can be very noisy. Do bell ringers really think their practicing is more important than other peoples sleep or peace and quiet.

My son and DIL are medics and work insane hours with a lot of nights, they would be stuffed if they lived close to a church. I wouldn't feel comfortable if I was a bell ringer if I knew I was causing other people to loose sleep.

I wonder how many churches bell ringers have modified their behavior over the years and how many have carried on as they always have.

Yes, practice is vital for learning and advancement, so that Sunday ringing doesn’t sound awful and there are ringers for the future. It’s not something you can learn at home and just have a go at on a Sunday,

Learning to ring is incredibly hard and takes years. Not having practices would be like sending someone who has just got their provisional licence out to drive on their own on a motorway.

No-one can get a tune out of bells because they're so big and heavy, unless they're tunes which happen to match the notes on consecutive bells. See the explanation at 23.57 yesterday.

If it's practice, it won't be continuous ringing.

Are you a local resident, have you complained? Surely practise should be for an hour ending no later than 7pm out of consideration for others.

Actually, bellringers are pretty considerate. Practice times are usually negotiated with the church concerned who will be very aware of the neighbours. People on here have mentioned practice going on till 10 pm, but that's unusual; most groups practice once a week for around two hours at most, between around 7 and 9, which isn't likely to bother medics on night shifts. In any event, people are rarely left with no choice but to live near a church with bells.

If you're so concerned about people's sleep and peace and quiet, would you say the same things about, for instance, sports venues? If you live near one of those you will regularly have to put up with noisy crowds. Should places like Wimbledon, Twickenham, Old Trafford "modify their behaviour"?

Must admit I once stayed in Shifnal next to a church and the bells went off hourly, even overnight. That seemed excessive.

'If you're so concerned about people's sleep and peace and quiet, would you say the same things about, for instance, sports venues? If you live near one of those you will regularly have to put up with noisy crowds. Should places like Wimbledon, Twickenham, Old Trafford "modify their behaviour"?'

That is a different kind of noise though. Traffic, crowds etc all tolerable. Bells ringing aren't just a background white noise type of thing they are absolutely intrusive. Half an hour on a Sunday morning at the most should more than suffice.

You’ve got three options:

1. move
2. learn to love it
3. sabotage the bell ropes.

I am sorry they make you feel like this.

That was a clock not the bells

We get many more complaints when we have to cancel a practice or the clock isn’t working than we ever do about the ringing (1 in 10 years).

Clearly written by someone who doesn't have a clue about bell ringing.

Ringers don't ring 'music' they ring methods, or patterns. It requires adjusting the speed of the bell to what the other bells are doing, hand eye coordination, a good memory, listening skills to get striking right, and logic to work out what to do when calls are made (changes to the pattern). It takes years to become a good ringer while practicing at least once a week as well as ringing for church on Sundays. It isn't just yanking at random on a rope, and if that is what you are hearing then clearly the ringers in your area are only ringing for half an hour on a Sunday.

Change ringing is one of the few things that is solely British - you only find it in a Britain and a few places that were former British colonies. It has been around for about 400 years and is part of our heritage and tradition that is dying out as ringers are aging out of being able to ring and younger ringers are not taking their places.

The tower I ring at has baffles to reduce the noise of the ringing and we have a simulator that allows people to learn to ring without inflicting a hideous clanging on the surrounding neighbourhood. Maybe the OP should investigate what is going on and ask if anything like that can be done.

My DD and I stayed in the St Paul's youth hostel which is, yes, next to St Paul's Cathedral. They do offer free earplugs as the clock chimes the quarter and the hour 24h. I'm not complaining about a historic monument - it took me back in fact to my childhood Christmases when we stayed at my grandfather's who lived in the Old Vicarage which was, you guessed it, next to the village church and it did chime hourly.
And no, nobody is getting up to ring it every hour!

I doubt that was bell ringing as talked about here. That would be chimes associated with the clock, like Big Ben.

Shifnal practice for 1.5 hours on on Thursday evenings and ring for 45 minutes before Sunday services

http://www.sacbr.org.uk/Towers/Shifnal/Shifnal.html

I don't know the bell ringers, so couldn't say how many hours each was doing, or whether it was more than one group, perhaps from out of the immediate area. But, I do know that each New Year's Day, they rang for 6 hours. Yes, there were short pauses.
I also know that I didn't wrap up, wrap up my child, make up flasks and wander around the meadow for hours on end, to escape a noise I had imagined. It wasn't a whole family hallucination. It happened.