Help: Frequently asked questions

Have you spelt the placename correctly? In most instances Dove uses the spelling on Ordnance Survey maps. Try alternative ways of spelling the place. We try to ensure that all names by which a tower might be known will be found when searching, but occasionally then it may not be returned as one of the results. Try a different search strategy, such as looking for the county concerned, or looking on the map.

Is it possible that there is no longer a ring of bells there? There is a list of lost rings available on the Keltek Trust website. Does the tower actually contain a ring as such, or is it a set of bells which can only be chimed? Have you been searching within a diocese for a church which has been declared redundant and is no longer owned by the diocese?

Certain keyboard characters such as an ampersand (&), comma (,) or hyphen (-) should not be included when searching. Also bear in mind that there are two other characters have special purposes as wildcards when searching: an asterisk (*) represents any number of characters, including none; and the question mark (?) represents any one character.

Finally, if you are convinced that the name you are searching for doesn’t produce a result, but you are certain that there is a ring of bells there, drop us an email telling us the name you were looking for and we will consider adding that as an alternative place name for the tower.

As noted on our conventions help page, we normally regard the latest edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory as the authoritative reference for the dedication of churches in the Church of England.

In our experience, when presented with good evidence Crockford will readily agree to change the dedication in for the next edition. An approach is usually best done in consultation with the Diocesan or parish office where there is probably an archivist with access to supporting historical records. If you succeed in getting a change made, do let us know and we will gladly change what we show.

As far as churches within the Church in Wales are concerned, Crockford also shows those, but the definitive repository for such information is the RB office in Cardiff and their website can be viewed via this link.

If you believe the weight shown is incorrect, let us know using the ’Dove Team’ link at the bottom left of each page. But please note that we will need supporting evidence to justify any change in tenor weight. Appropriate support could take the form of a copy of the original letter from the foundry that cast the bells or undertook subsequent work on them such as retuning.

Dove includes details of regular open practices, if we have been told them. If no details a listed, this may be because the tower does not hold open practices, or because they only happen infrequently or on an irregular schedule, or because no-one has told us about them. Please let us know if we are missing details of a regular practice night, or if the details shown are wrong.

We work on the basis that most practices start at around 7.30pm. If the start time is more than 25 minutes different, please tell us and we will include the time. If you do not hold a practice nearly every week, we can show simple alternative arrangements, such as joint practices with another tower.

We recommend that towers have a webpage which includes contact details and any variations to the normal practice arrangements. We will gladly link to this page if told about it.

Practice night information is not shown if ringing is suspended at a tower, for example during repairs to the tower.

Sunday service ringing times can change very frequently and we lack the resources to keep this information updated. We suggest that that a tower website is the best place to show this information, and will happily link to that site if we are told about it.

Association websites may also list the time of service ringing. We link to these from the tower details page, or there is a long list of associations, guilds and societies on the Change Ringing Resources site.

Text shown in green (like this) is normally a link to another place where more details can be found. If the text is a link, it will turn red when you move your mouse pointer over it.

As noted on our conventions help page, these indicate that ringing takes place from the ground floor (GF), that the ring is portable (P), that there is a simulator installed (S), or that there is a toilet available for ringers (T).

There is a link on the search page to Download results as POIs for SatNav. You can restrict the search results arbitrarily using the checkboxes on the list of results and then choosing Restrict to selection.

The first eight editions of the printed guide include chimes and carillons, both in churches and in secular buildings, though the list of chimes was never particularly complete. When Dove's data on towers was moved into a computer database, the first step to making it available online, a decision had to make on what to include. During production of the 9th Edition, it was decided that Dove is primarily about listing full-circle rings, and chimes were dropped.

The scope of Dove was expanded in 2021, first to include carillons in the British Isles, and later to include all bells in buildings under the jurisdiction of the Church of England. This includes many chimes. This has reinstatated many of the chimes dropped during preparation of the 9th Edition, but not those outside the Church of England – for example, in secular locations or in Scotland. It is our intention to reinstate these eventually. In the mean time, Mike Chester's website has a comprehensive list of chimes in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

If the replacement value is a precise weight, then please let us know how it was obtained. If it was made during a rehang or work carried out by a bellfoundry, then we will be pleased to include the new weight, together with details of its source.

The situation with a new approximation is quite different. Invariably, one person’s estimate will differ from another’s. Some people like to use a formula published in The Ringing World, 7 May 2004, p. 459 which takes the fourth power of the nominal, together with an empirical constant which varies with founder and age. However, our present policy is not to replace one approximate weight by another approximation in order to avoid long discussions on whose estimate is the better and an endless stream of changes to Dove.

We do not identify the Ornance Survey maps needed for towers because there is no single answer due to the overlap between these map. However, their website gives a very good range of facilities for finding out the best map, even printing a small section of it for your own use.

First, try looking to see whether the tower details page includes a website URL. About half of towers do, and these sites often provide information on how to contact the tower correspondent.

If that fails, the tower details page will say if the tower is affiliated to a local ringing association or guild or society. If the society has a website, the tower details page links to it: just click on the society name. Many society websites have lists of towers and contact details; failing that, one of the society’s officers may be able to help.

The link for contacting the Dove Team in the page footer does not provide a way of contacting the tower: it is for contacting us.

Please do not immediately write telling us that any one particular datum for a bell must be wrong. First, look at what we show as the source for the data: often it is a published work or a set of data that is easily accessible via the internet.

If a transcription error appears to have occurred – which is not impossible – then do please write in and tell us without further ado and, if confirmed, it will be corrected. It may be that we already have a database note indicating that the originally published value has been corrected, and then we will respond in such a vein. (Corrigenda to published works are not invariably produced and are often incomplete unless they are internet based.)

If the question remains, see our instructions on how to notify us of errors in bell details. There is one exception to this. That relates to our practice of not altering an estimate for a bell's weight (particularly for a tenor which will probably have been the value shown for some time in the Dove entry). Here our answer given to FAQ 11 applies.

Let us know if you know for certain that some part of the Dove entry is incorrect. While we do prefer someone connected with the tower itself to provide information, we'd far rather be told about what needs to be corrected than to leave the page with misleading data.

It is available from the Central Council's shop, priced at £17.00.

It is unlikely that we can help as we cannot possibly know the details about every different model of SatNav.

Please note that we strongly discourage the use of postcodes for navigation. They are only allocated to mail delivery points which rarely include churches, and rural areas, may cover a large area. However, we understand that they are helpful if the emergency services need to attend, so we do not intend to remove them and we will be pleased to be advised of any refinements.

By contrast, we do have confidence in the latitude and longitude of each tower (which have been refined by the kind work of Anne Sladen). Where we show an additional SatNav latitude and longitude, this is usually a convenient parking spot or access road.

The Dove Team are all volunteers with other commitments on their time. We therefore have to set priorities for how we deal with queries and submissions.

Emails that follow our guidelines and which use our standard editing forms are generally quicker to deal with and are prioritised. If you are sending emails, we prefer each email to deal with one and only one subject: covering several towers or issues in a single email makes it likely that parts will get overlooked.

Ordinarily you can expect a response within a week, or two during busy periods. But we do occasionally develop a backlog of submissions.

One common reason why you may not have received a reply from us is if you have entered your email address incorrectly. If that has been entered incorrectly, we have no way of getting back to you. A hint that you might not have entered it correctly will be given to you by the fact that you will not receive our automated acknowledgement email.

Locate the founder on the bell founders page, follow the link in the final column (headed 'Part Rings'). This will take you to a page listing all towers which contain a bell by that founder, regardless of whether the bell is part of the main ring or is an additional bell such as a sanctus bell. At the foot of the page there is the option to plot all these towers on a map which can offer a fascinating insight to the founder's area of operation.

The short answer is that probably no-one has notified us of that the information in Dove is wrong. We lack the resources to continually check and re-check each entry, so must rely on information being supplied to us.

We prefer that you just tell us promptly once the project has started. The difficulty with information in advance is that it leaves us having of deciding just what part of an entry should be changed and when, and then remember to do so. We also know that schedules can change.

For reasons beyond our control it has regrettably proved impossible for us to continue updating the iOS Dove App, and it reportedly no longer works satisfactorily on iOS 8. Accordingly, we advise that it is no longer available.

What3Words is a poor technical solution to a problem that does not exist. It is not an open standard, and their licensing scheme is costly and opaque. We strongly discourage its use and will not be including it in Dove’s Guide.

Historically they were in these counties, but as detached parts of the county some distance from the main part of the county. The northern part of Wokingham was in Wiltshire, but surrounded on all sides by Berkshire. It was transferred to Berkshire for administrative purposes in 1844. Most of Dudley was a detached part of Worcestershire, surrounded by on all sides by Staffordshire. This situation persisted until 1966.

Dove’s Guide uses the boundaries that existed at the start of 1844 for its definition of historic counties. Since then, there are been many small changes to the county boundaries and there is no good reason to prefer one date over another. By choosing the start of 1844 as our baseline, we can rely on the Definition B from the Historic Counties Standard to define the historic counties of Great Britain. These can be viewed on the Wikishire map.