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.

31 Jul 2026: Links to biographies of ringers at a tower

The Ringing History Hub of the Central Council’s History and Archive Workgroup contains biographical references to ringers associated with individual towers. The total number of references today stands at 17,480 relating to 13,895 ringers. These include the Rolls of Honour references commemorating those who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 and the 1939-1945 War. Following work by the H&A Group, users may now go into an individual tower page in Dove and follow a link to the list of those whose biographies are associated with that tower. Dove has evolved from just listing towers to listing (a) bells in that tower, (b) performances in Felstead and BellBoard, (c) peal boards, and now (d) people who rang there. There is more work to be done in improving these links, but this is a substantial step forward in the evolution of this resource.

1 Jul 2026: Augmentation recording project milestone reached

In January we announced that Dove was able to record specific augmentations of rings, reductions, changes in ring types (e.g. full-circle to chime) and the transfer of rings from one tower to another. We are fortunate that Tim Jackson has been notifying the ringing community quarterly updates on significant changes in Dove since the start of 2003, and it is this list Dickon Love has used to note c.550 augmentations. With this work done, further augmentations will be added by the team as advised in the usual way by our readership or specific investigation. The list of augmentations can be found here.

5 Jun 2026: Tim Pett - Dove Steward

It is with both gratitude and appreciation we note the retirement of Tim Pett as Dove Steward and from the Central Council. Tim has served in this role since 2017 and in that time has been part of the team overseeing the move to the new database, contributing to design and testing. Once the new database was launched, he processed the majority of newly submitted updates from the ringing community. To date he has processed 25,643 database updates relating to about 10,993 individual towers, with the first of these on 24 Feb 2020. It is also particularly welcome news that Tim will continue to work with the team processing updates, so will very much remain in the forefront of Dove activities. Thank you Tim for your commitment over the past decade and all you’ve done to make Dove what it is.

15 May 2026: Peal Boards

In support of the project to collect images and details of peal boards across the country, the History & Archive group of the Central Council, Dove and BellBoard have been working together to introduce a new way to collect and access these images. BellBoard already has the facility to allow users to add peal board images to performances. Where this has been done you can now view the peal boards and associated performances by clicking links from individual tower pages in Dove.

If you want your peal boards to appear, please create a BellBoard entry for the performance and attach the photograph. If the relevant performance is already there, either ask the person who originally uploaded the entry to attach your photograph, or use the Add Photo feature in BellBoard making it clear which performance this relates to. Data are shared between the two systems overnight so updates in one won’t instantly appear in the other.

In due course we expect to include additional data on each board and a quality control mechanism to improve and enrich the database. It is envisaged that the existing H&A Peal Board Database will be incorporated to create this ongoing crowd supported feature, allowing that team to curate the collection. This is another example of how we have been connecting all of our sources and co-operating across ringing. Our thanks go to the Ringing World and in particular the BellBoard Team for helping make this happen.

29 Apr 2026: Updated policy on website URLs

Dove has the ability to link to individual tower web pages from the tower details page to allow a visitor to find out more about the tower. The policy of updating these has been updated to help manage those occasions when considerable numbers of tower URLs are updated by individual associations or bell historian sites.

1. Dove will link to tower web pages on association web pages (except where a website redesign has broken existing URLs per point 3), to individual tower websites, to pages about the bells or ringers on the church website, and to tower pages on the websites of recognised bell historians.

2. When an association or historian’s website is rewritten, we expect the webmaster to take technical measures to ensure that the previous URLs to tower pages continue to work, for example by redirecting to the appropriate new page. This is standard good practice in web site management.

3. If an association or historian’s website does not make old URLs continue to work in a timely fashion we will remove our links to tower pages on the association website entirely instead of updating them. We endeavour to contact that site webmaster before doing this. If they can commit to getting the old URLs working again, we will leave the broken links in place while this work progresses; otherwise they will be removed promptly. Once removed, we will not ordinarily add links to that association or historian’s website again.

4. As an exception to point 3, if an association or bell historian moves from a free subdomain (e.g. borsetshire.provider.com) to their own domain (e.g. borsetshire-ringing.uk) we will update the URLs to accommodate this. There is no similar exception for other changes of domain. This is a significant amount of work and may take us several months to process. Please bear with us.