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.

30 Dec: Revision to the dating of undated bells

Dove has improved the way it displays the date of a bell and we are asking contributors to be mindful of how to submit estimated dates. Where a bell is undated, Dove now gives the understood founder’s period of activity. Therefore, when submitting an estimated date for a bell, please don’t provide anything outside the given founder’s period of activity, or at least specifically alert us if you believe the period needs correcting.

By way of background, when there is no date on the bell and the date of casting is not known, we have to resort to records to find or estimate the date. Where there are no records and no estimate, judgements need to be made based on information that IS known, such as the founder. Research sometimes tells us the period over which a founder was active. In that instance, Dove now shows the whole period rather than an estimated individual date. On devices that support hover text, you’ll see the description Founder’s period of activity; no better estimate of the date. When the identity of a founder is unknown, or their periods of activity are unknown, we continue to rely on the estimate of expert antiquarians, references to which are being collected. When all else fails, after a particular bell has been examined by suitable persons without any conclusion, it is marked n/d (not dated).

Where a bell just shows a founders period of activity, or a provisional estimate, there remains scope for these data to be the subject of research, which we encourage people to do. Dove still holds a large number of bells (circa 2,400) with estimated cast dates which may be better reflected with their founders periods of activity. It will take some time for the team to go through all of these, but is a project that the team is tackling.

8 Dec: Lightweight full-circle rings

We are pleased to announce the inclusion of lightweight full-circle rings of bells in Dove, most of which are in private ownership. We are grateful to all those who have assisted in providing data, either directly or via the Mini Ring Directory. We have chosen a definition for this category of ring based on weight alone (hence our decision to refer to lightweight rings rather than mini rings). For rings of 3 to 8, lightweight rings have a tenor of 1 cwt or less. For rings of 10 this rises to 2 cwt and for rings of 12, to 3 cwt. To safeguard the privacy of private residences, we do not give the map co-ordinates for the location of these rings.

1 Dec: Welcoming Ryan Faulkner-Hatt to the Dove Team

We are pleased to welcome Ryan Faulkner-Hatt to the Dove Team. Ryan is a young ringer from Prittlewell in Essex and for some years a member of the Essex Young Eagles team in the Ringing World National Youth Contest. He has a particular interest in engineering and bell history and has been a regular contributor to Dove. He has joined the team to work on a new project, more of which will be announced in due course.

7 Jul: Great Bells of the British Isles

We are pleased to announce an addition to the scope of the towers listed in Dove. Readers of the printed version will be familiar with the list of Notable Bells of the British Isles in the appendices, specifically all those over 40 cwt. The towers that hold these bells have now been incorporated into the web version and can be found here. There are currently 150 bells given in this list, headed up by the Olympic Bell in Queen Elizabeth Park, Stratford at almost 451 cwt. From this list, readers will also be able to see what other bells accompany these significant bourdons, such as quarter bells in clock chimes, or lighter bells in diatonic chimes, or whether the bells are simply hanging alone.