english change ringing

We went to a church south of Cambridge recently to witness the English bell ringing technique called change ringing. I have learned about this on many of the weekly Cambridge walking tours I take, and was very curious to see how it's done.

"Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes." It differs from many other forms of campanology in that no attempt is made to produce a conventional melody. It remains most popular in the context where, in the 17th century, it developed: English church towers."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_ringing)



Up in the bell tower. The bells weighed some thousand pounds each. Some of them were as old as the 15th Century, and some had been melted down and re-cast.


Going up all those rickety ladders made me very aware of how long it had been since I'd climbed a ladder, and how rusty I was. But I survived.


The ringers. It looked physically strenuous and even more mentally strenuous to play, but there was a little 8 year old girl amongst them, making it seem easy. (See the rickety ladder over there?!)


The "music"/ bell sequences they MEMORIZE and play. Ok, not so easy. It blows my mind, actually.