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.

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.

14 Jan 2026: Transferred rings, change of ring type and augmentations

We are pleased to announce that Dove is able to capture specific changes to the location and constitution of rings.

Transfers - We now show when a ring has moved from one place to another. The transferred ring is shown on the pages for both source and destination places, although the source place page will not be accessible if there are no-longer any in-scope bells. In due course we hope to extend the scope of Dove to include all places with lost rings. A summary page is available giving the list of transferred rings.

Ring types - We identify those projects where a collection of bells moves from, say, a full-circle ring to a chime (or vice versa). The data here will in future support the display of lost rings.

Augmentations (and reductions) - We can explicitly label when a ring is augmented or reduced. A summary page is available giving the list of augmentations and reductions.

The team is currently populating Dove with data on transfers, changes in ring types and augmentations from our own research. We therefore kindly ask readers NOT to send in updates relating to this at this time as it will likely duplicate what we already have.

It is worth emphasising that these features just relate to whole rings of bells. In due course we hope to extend this work to include individual bells.

Special thanks go to Dave Kelly and the Keltek Trust, the source of most of the data we are entering and presenting.

7 Jan 2026: When new rings are created

This is the first of a series of announcements about new features appearing in Dove. We are now able to describe the creation of a new ring.

For an entirely new ring, the creation year is the year the last bell of a ring of bells was cast. If a ring is not installed until a later year or installed by a different hanger from the founder, that is noted as a separate event in the history of the ring. Augmentations will also be dealt with as additions to an existing ring.

This also introduces the principle of what constitutes a new ring (or collection) of bells, particularly after a proportion of them are recast/replaced. If more than half of a ring of bells is recast we consider this to be a brand new ring (consequently leaving a lost ring behind). If exactly half of the ring is recast, we only consider this to be a brand new ring if the tenor is one of those affected.

These details appear in the Projects & overhauls section with the label ring created.