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.
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 send a copy of your photograph to the H&A Peal Boards Team at pealboards@cccbr.org.uk. 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.