Ringing handbells is a really good way to get used to counting your place in a row and to understand how methods work. Because there are no real issues with handling, you can progress with change ringing on handbells long before your bell control is good enough to do it on tower bells.

Not everybody gets the opportunity to ring handbells as not all ringers can do this – if there isn’t anybody who can help in your tower, try contacting your local ringing society, use ART or social media to try to find somebody who can help.

To start with, you need to learn how to hold and strike the bells – up for handstroke and down for backstroke. It isn’t quite as easy as you might imagine! You have to ensure that the clapper strikes the bell cleanly. You should then move on to ring rounds with two bells and perhaps Plain Hunt on one bell, before progressing to changes using two handbells.

Write or print out Plain Hunt on 6 bells with a line drawn through bells 1 and 2. They are “coursing bells” so they follow each other around with one bell in between, apart from when they meet at the front and back.  Do the same for 5 and 6 and you will see that they follow the same pattern but (obviously) start at the back of the change so they hunt down and then back up.

To have a go at this, you will need some experienced handbell ringers to help you. However, you can use one of the ringing packages (e.g. Abel or Beltower) to practise on a PC or phone by yourself and astound everybody.  You may get hooked and want to take it further!

 

Why not have a look at the new Learning the Ropes Handbell Scheme and aim to achieve at least Level 1

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