rowan.... rowan; “i mean yes of course i have been in dangerous bell situations” - Rowan
look. look! there are a lot of dangerous bell situations you can get into! even the smallest church bells are still several hundredweight, so that’s several hundred pounds of metal you’re trying to control.
like, okay, batbetbitbotbut mentioned the issue with full vertical ringing is that you don’t want to break the stay, which is the bit of wood that prevents the bell from just going round and round and round and round and ROUND AND ROUND until it has exhausted all its kinetic energy. you go round one rotation, stop the bell just before it reaches the stay, rotate back the other way, stop the bell, etc etc etc. it works well. you don’t die. you control the bell.
but the stay is just a piece of wood up in a church tower; eventually, even if you’re a perfect ringer and never ever tap the stay when you’re ringing (that’s why you stop just before you reach the stay, so you’re not wearing the wood out faster), it will break. when that happens, the first thing you learn when you’re ringing is that you let go. you let go of the damn rope, you let it go up into the ceiling, you look ashamed and awkward while everyone else stops ringing and figures out what to do. otherwise, that rope is climbing towards the ceiling with all the stored energy of a several-hundred-pound bell and it will take it with you.
this is why, by the way, your belfry ceiling should be low. I learned at my grandmother’s church - and I should say, I was never more than a learner; I didn’t visit my grandmother often enough to get good, and I could only ring occasionally at my own church because I would’ve needed to be in the belfry ringing at the same time as I was getting robed up for the choir - but at her church, the belfry ceiling was maybe seven feet at most. it was a small room, and the holes which the rope disappeared through were sometimes unsettlingly near, but when someone broke a stay, or had any other misfortune, at worst they would have been dragged up a couple of feet and slammed into the ceiling. you should still let go, but that’s a good precaution.
now, at my church, the belfry ceiling was far distant. I think it was actually the floor of the room that the bells were housed in, and it was, god, it was so high that I cannot even estimate it. look at a church tower. divide it in half. yeah, maybe that high.
so, obviously trying to perfectly control the ropes up that height was a problem, so they’d put in a sort of metal framework; little circles where the ropes should go through, and a few struts connecting each circle.
first off, obviously, if you break a stay and don’t let go, you’re in trouble. at the very best, you’re hitting the metal frame ten, twenty feet above you. if you don’t manage to stop then... well. up the tower you go. it wasn’t safe. I didn’t like it.
the other thing about this setup was that, as I was always a learner, I was often having some amount of trouble controlling the bell. as I’ve said a lot, it’s several hundred pounds of bell, and the ringing system is set up so that you personally are not moving all several hundred pounds, because we’re not weightlifters. what this does mean is that you have to be really in tune with everything else in the mechanism, or you’ll lose control of the bell as it starts swinging to its own tune.
now, that’s possible in all places. I’ve lost control at my grandmother’s church enough! but there, well, the rope is going through a small hole in the ceiling seven feet up, and then it’s going through more rooms and more small holes and... you get the idea. even if you fuck up - and you can and will - it’s a lot easier to recover there.
my church, though - well, the metal circles, like I said, were a) quite large and b) a long way above us. and above that, there’s nothing until you hit the ceiling. losing control of a bell there was always terrifying, because suddenly this rope is leaping around like a live fish in your grip, and you’re trying desperately to hold onto it and get it back into place so that you can continue ringing and not break a fucking stay, but none of the design of that goddamn belfry worked with you in any way whatsoever. terrifying. (the floor of that belfry was also a lot bigger, so it wasn’t like someone could just quickly set their bell to rest and help you by moving over two feet; they’d have to do that and get across to where you were and deal with the furiously angry rope. terrifying. and, yeah, honestly pretty dangerous. the worst I’ve been hurt is rope burns and pulled muscles, which honestly is pretty par for the course, but - yeah. make your belfries safer! have fun ringing and not worrying that you will be pulled into the infinite darkness of the tower above you!
