A simulator records every bell by a sensor on the wheel, because that is how a band checks its striking. Ours reports a bell nine, in time, on a frame that has eight.
I am the tower captain of a parish church with a ring of eight.
The measuring is what I want to explain, because ringers are the only hobbyists I know who instrument themselves this thoroughly.
Every bell hangs on a wheel and swings full circle. On our frame each bell has a small sensor that sees a magnet on the wheel go past at the moment the clapper strikes.
That goes to a box in the ringing chamber, which is a simulator and recorder, and it writes down every strike with a time to the millisecond.
What the band gets out of it is a striking analysis: a chart showing whether each bell fell where it should in the row. It is unforgiving and it has made us all better ringers.
The recorder has eight inputs. There are eight bells and eight sensors and eight channels of wire.
Since 2021 the analysis has been reporting a ninth.
Not on a ninth channel, because there is not one. What it reports is strikes on the eighth channel that are not the eighth bell.
The software works this out by itself, which is the part I did not expect. Every bell has a signature: the interval between the strike and the wheel sensor, the swing time, the speed it comes back. Those are physical and they are different for a five hundredweight tenor and a two hundredweight treble.
The eighth channel carries two signatures. One is our tenor. The other is a bell with a longer swing than the tenor.
A longer swing means a heavier bell.
Our tenor is fourteen hundredweight, which is a decent parish tenor and takes a strong ringer.
The other signature, worked backwards from the swing period the way you would size a bell you cannot see, comes out somewhere over twenty hundredweight.
There is no such bell in this tower. There is not room in the frame for one and the frame is Victorian and complete and I have been up in it a hundred times.
When it happens.
Only during a peal or a quarter peal. Never in practice, never for service ringing, never on a Sunday.
A quarter peal is at least twelve hundred and fifty changes and takes about forty five minutes. A full peal is over five thousand and takes three hours, and it is the hardest thing most ringers ever do.
We ring maybe six quarters and one peal a year. It appears in about half of them.
It comes in at the start of the second hour, roughly, and it stays for between eleven and forty minutes and then it is not there any more.
Where it strikes.
In the row. That is the sentence that made a man who has rung for fifty years put his glass down in a pub car park.
It is not noise and it is not an echo and it is not a bell being clipped. It strikes in a position, in the order, and it moves through the change the way a bell does. It is doing the method.
I have printed the analysis and taken it to two people who know more about this than I do. One of them said it was a wiring fault. The other one, who is a retired engineer and a peal ringer of forty years, took it away for a month and rang me and asked whether I had ever heard the tower ringing when there was nobody in it.
I said no. He said good, and would not say any more, and he has since stopped coming.
What has been done to it.
The recorder was replaced in 2022, a different make, eight channels, new sensors, new wire. Same.
Every sensor was moved to a different bell to see whether the fault followed the hardware or the position. It followed neither. It is on whichever channel the tenor is on.
We rang a quarter with the tenor's sensor disconnected entirely, which gives you seven channels of data and a hole where the tenor should be.
The analysis for that quarter shows seven bells and a ninth.
The eight of us.
Ringing is not a thing you can do quietly on your own in the corner. Eight people stand in a circle in a small room holding eight ropes and every one of us can see every other one.
Nobody has ever seen a ninth rope. I want to say that plainly because it is what everybody asks next.
What two of us have said, separately, without prompting, and years apart, is that during a long peal the room feels smaller than it is. Both of them used that word, smaller, and both of them looked embarrassed saying it.
What I do about it.
I keep ringing peals, because that is what a tower is for, and because a captain who cancelled peals over a data channel would be a captain for about a fortnight.
What I changed is that I stopped printing the analysis for a quarter or a peal and pinning it in the chamber, which I did for years and which the band liked.
I keep them at home now, in a folder, and I tell everybody the printer is broken.
The last one was in the May. The ninth came in at fifty two minutes and it stayed for the rest of the peal, which was two hours and eleven minutes more.
It struck in ninth place every row. That is the position at the back, after the tenor, and it means that for two hours somebody stood behind our heaviest bell and covered, which is what you do when you are keeping a band steady and letting the others get on with the method.
It is what you put a beginner on, or an old ringer who cannot manage the fast work any more but who has been ringing in that tower a long time.