The app
BELFRY
Change ringing, drawn out.
The sound of church bells ringing changes is unmistakably English, but the craft behind it — bells struck not as tunes but in ever-shifting mathematical orders — looks baffling on paper. Belfry unravels it, turning the daunting blue-line diagrams that ringers learn from into something you can watch happen. Pick a method and the full grid of rows appears, each row a different order of the bells, with your chosen bell's path traced as a line weaving through the changes and the treble picked out beside it.
- Methods
- Bell tracer
- Quizzes
The player
One change at a time
Advance a single change and see exactly which pairs of bells swap between rows, watch the order arranged on a circle of bells, or let it run at a speed you set while a plain-language note says what your working bell is doing: hunting up, making places, dodging. Because it teaches rather than records, strikes are shown visually with an optional gentle tick, so attention stays on the pattern.
It starts wherever you are. A beginner primer explains rounds, changes, place notation and how to read a blue line at all, and a tracer follows one bell until it clicks. From there come the classics:
- iRounds and call changes.
- iiPlain Hunt on several stages.
- iiiPlain Bob.
- ivGrandsire Doubles.
Each is generated by real ringing logic, so every row is true and every plain course comes home to rounds exactly as it should. Quizzes then test you: predict the next row, name the bell a line belongs to, judge whether a row is true, say what a call does. Choose your stage, toggle the treble line, set the trace colour and pace, pick a tower or rope backdrop. Offline, no account, no ads.
Package com.ropeloft.belfry
Reading a blue line is not handling a bell. A tower bell weighs from a couple of hundred kilos to several tonnes, and a rope round a wrist or a bell left up can injure or kill. Never touch a rope in a tower without a qualified teacher beside you and the tower's permission, learn from your local band rather than from a screen, and mind your hearing in the chamber. Belfry teaches the patterns; the rope is taught by people.
Working out
Why nobody has rung all twelve
An extent is every possible order of the bells, each rung once, with no repeats. On n bells there are n! orders, and the rule that bells may only swap with a neighbour means each row has a limited set of legal successors: the number of ways to pick non-overlapping adjacent pairs, which is a Fibonacci number.
40,320
possible rows, every one of them rung once
The speed here is not invented: it comes from the 40,320 changes rung at Loughborough in 1963, which took 17 hours 58 minutes, or 1.60 seconds a change. On seven bells the whole extent is 5,040 rows, which is exactly why a peal is 5,040 changes and takes about two and a quarter hours. Add a bell and it becomes eighteen hours; add another and it is a week; at twelve bells the extent runs to 479,001,600 rows and something over twenty-four years of continuous ringing.
What's not here: no methods, no blue lines, no rows and no player. This page counts the size of the problem, and it never shows a single change — which is precisely what the app is for. The timing assumes one steady speed and a band that never rests, neither of which exists.
On paper
EchoRidge Studio
- Company
- SERIOUS SPORT TRAINING ACADEMY LTD, trading as EchoRidge Studio
- Director
- Brian Nicholas Morgan
- Address
- 3 Walker Close, Westhampnett, Chichester PO18 0GX, United Kingdom
If a plain course doesn't come home to rounds, or a note describes the wrong piece of work, tell us the method, the stage and the row number. Ringers notice these things first and we would rather hear it from you.