Unusually (it seems) I had a weekend without a half-marathon Challenge Race this weekend.
Although it’s only been a week since Oxford, it does feel a lot longer, but then it was a busy week last week. It was nice to get away and do something else.
I travelled over to the Chesterfield area along with a number of bell ringing colleagues. Clive organises a 10-bell quarter peal tour each year. I went on the first one about 4 years ago up in Cumbria, but this is only the second one I’ve been on.
We did well, attempting and scoring all five quarter peals including the last one which was a method we all learned for the tour and that most people seemed to be trying to talk the band out of ringing. In fact it went better than a couple of the other ones which had a few ragged edges at times.
The Quarter Peal records are here – Ashover – Worksop – Newark – Chesterfield – Ranmoor
All were enjoyable rings. Newark were heavy work but sounded glorious, more than making up for the effort. In fact it was probably the band’s best ringing of the weekend. The Ranmoor (at Ranmoor) went surprisingly well and again sounded good on the bells. The Yorkshire and Stedman both ‘had issues’ but with determination and some out-of-this-world conducting by David in the latter, both were successful.
Chesterfield tower is an oddity in itself due to it’s crooked nature. The folklore is that the devil sat on the spire, but a more plausible explanation is poor materials supporting the spire in its early years before the existing stone structure was completed. In the tower is a graphical display of the yearly movements of the tip of the spire relative to the correct centre position.
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