This story is more than a love affair with bells! Sue and Ian Turner moved to the Highlands several years ago after getting married and setting up a B&B in idyllic surroundings. And here are the photos to prove it!

By happy chance, Sue had already tried ringing while living in England and, after moving to Lochaber, they discovered that their next door neighbours just happened to run a Teaching Centre! They each tell us how things developed.

Sue

I first rang, with my son Nick, for the Millennium when we lived in Oxfordshire. Our village, Lower Heyford, had a lovely church where the bells hadn’t been rung for many years and I wanted to organise the villagers to ring the bells once again for this one-in-a-lifetime event. We novices were helped by the bands at our local towers in Steeple Aston and Somerton and successfully achieved the original aim after some tuition.

However, with no-one to lead the tower in the village, we all stopped ringing at that point.

15 years later, having remarried, I moved with my husband, Ian, up to Lochaber to run a small Bed and Breakfast. After a few months there I went to visit our neighbour at Tulloch Farm, five minutes up the road, to see their new baby goat. It was then I discovered from chatting to the farm manager that the farm also had a Ringing Centre.

After being encouraged by Helen McGregor (who is very persuasive as well as an excellent teacher) I re-started ringing in May 2016 at Tulloch.
Facilities there are ideal for beginners (and returners) with the main tower having 12 larger bells (1 cwt to 7cwt), a ring of 8 smaller bells (1cwt ands maller) as well as a simulator. I have also started to learn handbell ringing which is a good complement to the tower bells, and most recently, in March, I rang my first quarter peal – on the treble to Plain Bob Doubles!

Ian

Sue continued ringing over the summer while I stayed at home keeping an eye on the B&B. However, Sue and Helen’s enthusiasm encouraged me to give it a try. Starting from scratch with a series of excellent teachers means I’ve avoided picking up any undesirable habits.

I am very competitive and, having given up running and orienteering following a hip replacement, I needed a new challenge. Like orienteering, bell ringing has both a mental and a physical element, which suited me well. The simulator, giving a score out of 10, brought out the competitor in me when ringing alongside Sue, each of us wanting to beat the other!

Because our local band is so limited in numbers, and most of us are quite inexperienced, we have benefited from visiting ringers coming to Tulloch. These have improved our ringing and we have gleaned helpful tips on how to improve. Just watching bands ring complex methods helps
us to see what our goal is.

Helen and her husband Peter divide their time between Tulloch and Alderney, so they have kindly arranged for visiting teachers to come to Tulloch over the Winter and Spring when they are not around. The luxury of nearby towers with experienced ringers isn’t available to us in a rural community where the next towers are about 2 hours’ drive away. However, as part of our ongoing education we have had two tower visits to Inverness Cathedral, one just before Remembrance Sunday on the half-muffled bells.

The Abel simulator at Tulloch is excellent, using a laptop with visuals (i.e. moving bell ringers) projected onto a large flat screen TV, so we can practise our ropesight. This seems better than some other simulators elsewhere which rely on sound only. We have used the simulator from the outset, initially as an aid to learning, then later on when we were on our own, setting our own goals to improve our consistency. The simulator disturbs no-one, so unlimited time can be spent on it, morning, afternoon or evening. Even the best visiting ringers enjoy the competition of getting their own high score recorded on the adjacent white-board.

Meanwhile, with Helen’s encouragement, Sue and I enrolled in the Learning the Ropes scheme and have achieved LtR Level 2, and we aim to achieve Level 3 soon! We have recently enjoyed a Quarter Peal day at Tulloch, where the local learners were supported by three other ringers.

Sue rang the treble when I rang the 4th inside to a quarter of Bob Doubles. I separately managed a quarter of Bob Doubles on the tenor and the same day we had two other new Tulloch ringers, both returning to ringing after a gap of 40 years, completing quarters, one (like us) for the first time.

Our Bed & Breakfast (see www.larchwoodlochaber.co.uk) has benefited from the proximity of the Tulloch Ringing Centre and we have enjoyed having a number of Scottish and English ringers stay with us whilst they visited Tulloch. Hopefully there will be many more in the years to come!

In conclusion, bell ringing in the Highlands of Scotland has been a most enjoyable experience for us both, having met so many nice and helpful people. One of the many highlights so far was ringing in the 2017 New Year with Peter, Helen and two others from the local band after a ceilidh at Tulloch Farm.

The Quarter Peal band which rang Plain Bob Doubles on March 1 at Tulloch.

Left to right: Sue Turner, David Ford, Helen McGregor, Peter Bevis, Stephen
Rossiter and Ian Turner.

This article appeared in the April 2017 edition of Tower Talk – the quarterly magazine for ringers, written by ringers.  This free magazine is available to download here, or you can subscribe for future editions here.