Our trip to Loch Sween House, formerly known as Dun a' Bhuilg and location of the second and third Scottish Association handbell peals, is coming up very soon. We will have nine good surprise royal ringers, so it's an opportunity to work on a 12-bell project and we have Bristol...

Peter King's composition of 23-spliced treble bob major was recently rung on handbells for the first time, having been rung only twice (I think) on tower bells. The band was Jonathan Agg, Lucy Warren, Julian Howes and Alan Reading. Posting in the Bellringers Facebook group, Philip Earis wrote: 

The...

On Sunday we had a surprise minor session with Alison, who came over from Edinburgh. She had previously rung a quarter of Cambridge on the trebles, and wanted to practise the other pairs. After ringing courses on 5-6 and then 3-4, we kept her on 3-4 and worked our way...

This week we finally managed to get a ten-bell band together, and we succeeded with a quarter of Fermanagh. Like many of the methods I've been advocating as a modern surprise royal repertoire, it has a clear separation between frontwork and backwork. There are also many minor and major...

We often discuss rule-based ringing, but what about exception-based ringing?

There are lots of examples. Ipswich is Cambridge with plain hunting at the half lead; Quedgeley is Yorkshire with far-dodge-near in 5-6; New Cambridge is Cambridge with dodge and lead in 6th place bell; Maypole is Bristol with the treble...

After discovering Nottinghamshire Delight as a major method with the key features of Fermanagh, I started thinking about other major methods that have key features of the royal or maximus methods that I'm interested in. There are lots of surprise major methods with Zanussi points at the back, but what...

The plan for Monday this week was to practise Fermanagh Surprise Royal, but we were one short because of illness. As Nottinghamshire Delight Major has a similar structure - Cornwall with some wrong hunting inserted into the frontwork - we decided to ring a quarter of it, and managed very...

This is about methods in general rather than handbell ringing, but I came to it while pondering Buckfastleigh as a possible method to ring next time we find ourselves with only four people. It's one of the methods from Chandler's 23-spliced, but isn't rung very often by itself. I've never...