An easy quarter of Cyclic Spliced Royal

Submitted by simon on

Cyclic spliced is occupying me at the moment. I've just published a video on YouTube to mark the 25th anniversary of the first performance of David Pipe's Cyclic Six Maximus. A couple of weeks ago I had an article in The Ringing World (issue 5923) about cyclic spliced major, including (but not only) the Cyclic Four quarter that I wrote about a little while ago. If you don't subscribe to The Ringing World, you can buy that issue for £2.50. I was supposed to be going for Cyclic Six Maximus handbells this coming weekend, for the anniversary, but unfortunately the attempt has evaporated and I'm left with a tower bell attempt which will still be fun.

I've been thinking about a 10-bell version, after noticing this quarter rung by my friends in Oxford, which rings just three cyclic parts instead of nine. Quite clever and suitable for a shorter length, but I haven't yet managed to adapt the idea to spliced using methods such as Remus and Sgurr A' Chaorachain. However, while pondering the structure of the Cyclic Six peal of maximus and the Cyclic Four quarter of major, I came up with a royal version using mostly plain methods.

The idea is to use the same palindromic structure, with the link method at the beginning of the part (as in the maximus) rather than at the end of the part (as in the major). For the main sequence of methods we need place bell orders of +1, -2, +3 and -4, which can be achieved by methods based on Plain Bob with the treble hunting to various positions lower than 10th place. Plain Bob is +1 of course, Little Bob is -2, and Gainsborough (treble hunting to 8th place) is -4. That leaves the +3 method in which the treble hunts to 6th place, giving a 3-lead course. I wasn't sure whether that method would have been rung and named already, but it turns out that is has and it's called Burford. The link "method" was going to be four leads of Oxford Differential Little Bob, but it doesn't quite work because the 10th place lead end results in falseness with the lead head of one of the leads of Plain Bob, because Plain Bob has a 2nd place lead end. This can be fixed by ringing a 1230 single at the end of every lead of Oxford. When entering the composition into CompLib, I found it easier to define a new method with 1230 as the lead end place. It has three hunt bells (1, 2 and 3) and the other bells ring Bastow on the back 8. Provisionally I call it Linky Little Bob. Amusingly, when I created Linky in CompLib yesterday, I got a warning that the method already existed - created by me last September which I had forgotten. Even the name was the same!

Here is the composition.

1152 Spliced Royal (5m)
Simon J Gay

              1234567890
------------------------
Linky         1236485079
Linky         1238604957
Linky         1230896745
Linky         1239078564
Plain         1302896745
Little        1927350486
Burford       1083624957
Gainsborough  1795243608
Gainsborough  1860435279
Burford       1574962830
Little        1648507392
Plain         1456789023
------------------------
9 part.

You will of course realise that 1152 isn't long enough for a quarter. That can be fixed by replacing one lead of Gainsborough by the 2nd place lead end version of Albany Little Treble Place. Replacing the second lead gives slightly more four-bell runs. The length goes up to 1260 - perfect. Here is the composition in CompLib. I have used the name Quadrant for 2nd place Albany, but as we haven't rung this quarter yet, the method is available to be named (along with Linky, unless you prefer to consider it Oxford DLB with a 1230 single) by you, dear reader.

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