A good time to ring the changes

A short touch of Stedman's Triples may not be your normal entertainment, especially when the instructions are "in five parts, chart 840, call her the last whole turn, out quick, in slow, the second half turn and out slow.  The years have taken their toll on St Fin Barre's bells, which will soon give their last performance before refurbishment, writes Mary Leland

Four times repeated." But up here in the ringing room of the belfry of St Fin Barre's Cathedral touches, bobs, dodges and triples are music for both morning and night.

We are standing under the bells, their peals muffled by the double ceiling between us and the bell chamber - in fact the bells don't sound as majestic and jubilant as they do when heard outside the building. But even following band captain Heather Heaslip up the cramped spiral stairway and breathing in that ineradicable whiff of ecclesiastical dust becomes something of an adventure - the stone spiral is so narrow, the doors are set flush to the walls, the handrail to which I cling with appropriate fervour is slick with the passage of generations of damp palms.

The ringing room is a surprise, with its brick vault rising to a ceiling, with the trapdoor in the floor of the chamber above us matched by the trapdoor at our feet. These allow the safe passage of the bells should they have to be released from their frame in the tower and brought, rather than rung, down. The ropes don't hang but are folded into a kind of home-made funnel with a 60-watt bulb glowing underneath. This is to keep them warm and pliant.

"You don't want the tail ends to be stiff," says Heaslip in the first of the warning notes which ripple through the next 90 minutes; "that could be unpleasant."

She prepares for rehearsal by arranging the characteristic coiled knot with which all the ropes are kept when not being pulled, to signify that the bells are up. As the ringing room is small and eight ringers are expected - and arrive even from Skibbereen and Doneraile - I must sit tight to the wall and must not cross my legs (those ropes!).

While Heaslip explains the dynamism of ropes and bells and the important differences between the up (ready and dangerous) and the down (resting and safe) bell positions, I find myself trying to remember the name of that Dorothy L Sayers book with Lord Peter Wimsey and murder not in the vicarage but in the belfry - yes, The Nine Tailors.

The wind howls around the tower, voices echo up the tunnel of the stairway, and up above us the great wheels are poised. I'm no Quasimodo, but there is an immense, suppressed and potent silence up in the bell-chamber, with each soundbow gleaming at the inside edge of the bells.

THIS IS NOT a carillon as at Shandon or Cobh Cathedral where the bells are played in tunes by a single person. Here the ringers are a band, and the ringer who calls the changes which make the pattern, or the method, is the conductor and can change from person to person. Ringing is an exacting science with a language, dating at the latest from the 17th century, of its own. If not all Greek to me, it is certainly all geometry, but with a poetic twist: "Look to; treble's going, she's gone," calls Heather and with this injunction all eight ringers haul on the ropes in a coherent and tuneful sequence.

It's done by numbers, which give first the succession of bells in rounds and then the changes according to recognised patterns such as plain hunting. Then comes method-ringing using a non-repeating pattern, and if anyone thought that ringing a peal was simply a matter of letting rip, the truth is that this is described as a "true touch" of at least 5,000 changes taking more than three hours to ring.

No one ever just stops; after the call "that's all" the ropes are caught and held again in sequence.

The pulling hand is on the sally, a coloured, tufted grip for the handstroke toward the end of the rope; the tail or coil is held in the other hand and always knotted when the bell is stilled ("You never let go the tail when you're ringing!").

And high in the ceiling overhead are the brackets into which the ropes disappear on their way to the sound-chamber and then to the the bell-frame, the wheels and the headstock.

This whole apparatus is soon to be the concern of Mathew Higby of Bath, specialist in bell frames and bells. Rain has been getting in through the louvres on the belfry and has been gradually corroding the supporting structure. As these are fairly large bells - the tenor is more than 27 cwt (1,225 kilos) with a diameter of four feet, seven and three-quarter inches (1.4 metres) - weakened supports are not a good idea, and a new frame of galvanised steel girders is to be installed, along with a lead-lined protective floor for the bell-chamber.

SO, FOR THE first time since 1903, all eight bells have to come down, to be refurbished in Bath. The cathedral administration hopes to display them at St Fin Barre's until the business of transporting them is finalised.

Although cast in 1751 by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester, their inscriptions are still legible, including "Peace and Good Neighbourhood" on one, "May the Trade of This City Flourish" on another. The belief is that bells were in every church on this ancient site, but the first mention of a bell tower is in 1670 when John Follit, registrar of the diocese, subscribed £5 toward the cost of the tower, built in 1676.

Now the cost of the repair and refurbishment process is estimated at €150,000, and will take four to five months, during which the bell-ringers, in a traditional fellowship, will travel to some of the 35 towers with ringable bells in Ireland.

Sounding every Sunday morning since long before this cathedral was built in 1867, these bells will ring in the New Year as one of their last peals in their present condition. Before that they will ring to announce the "Service of Nine Lessons and Carols", one of the most festive and jubilant events in the religious calendar.

The glory of the cathedral on these occasions is the combined choir of boy and girl choristers, choral scholars and gentlemen, although the congregation also gets a fair share of the singing. To the choir, even the little singers for whom Gregorian plain chant, Taverner, Tallis or John Rutter hold no terrors, this is just one more service, yet it is perhaps their favourite one.

Some idea that this is the culmination of their year-round dedication communicates itself to the public: there is a sense of trembling, breathless anticipation in the vaulted cathedral as the boy soprano leads off with Once in Royal David's City. The choir candles are alight, the choristers robed in red and white, the atmosphere is both serene and expectant.

Organist and choirmaster Colin Nicholls (who is also conductor with the East Cork Choral Society), now joined by his recently appointed assistant James Taylor (also a member of the new baroque quartet "Beyond the Pale"), has his own way of ringing the changes from year to year, but if Erin or Cassiobury Surprise or St Remigius is your preference, then you just have to listen to the bells.

The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols will take place at St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork, tomorrow at 8pm and on Sun, Dec 24 at 3.30pm