A guide to towers throughout the world with bells used for change ringing and other bells of interest.
First published in book form by Ronald H Dove in 1950, this is the online guide managed by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, now extended to details of bells, frames, founders and projects. Find out more about Dove’s Guide…
The printed Dove’s Guide for Church Bell Ringers is
on sale.
Grateful thanks are given to those who contribute additions or revisions. This includes bellringers, researchers and the bellfounding and bellhanging industry. Your support is vital to maintain the quality of this resource.
Updates can be submitted from the individual tower pages, or by email to the Dove Team. Please see our help pages for further information.
26 Nov: Welcoming Kye Leaver to the Dove Team
We are pleased to announce that KYE LEAVER has joined the Dove Team as a Dove Clerk. Kye, already a keen researcher for Dove, is from Sussex and is currently studying horology at college. He is already making good progress in processing entries in our backlog of frames updates as the more observant will notice from recent updates.
29 Sep: Bell hanging types, tubular bell lengths, menu of truss and layout types
Dove now displays how individual bells are hung. This is found in the bells table for each tower where this information is known. The abbreviations are FC (full-circle in the style used for English change ringing), S (swing chiming), D (hung dead unable to swing), U (not hung).
For tubular chimes, we now also show the length of each tube, where known.
Finally, we have set up pages to allow the reader to browse truss types and layout types, although we still recommend that reference is made to Chris Pickford’s book Bellframes, A practical guide to inspection and recording when contributing updates.
28 Jan:
Derelict’ rings and ’No regular ringing
We have made the decision to stop using the ill defined term derelict’. In each case such rings are also marked as ’unringable
, which is considered sufficient.
Similarly, we have decided to stop noting No regular ringing
as we do not receive sufficient numbers of updates to maintain this as a reliable reference. We continue to show practice night information (where advised), temporary pauses in ringing, and other more definitive ringing statuses.