Dove's Guide lists 7,262 rings of bells hung for full-circle change ringing, holding 45,682 bells. I mapped every one: where they hang, how heavy they are, how old, who cast them, and the years when England cast the most.
Some time in the early seventeenth century, English ringers found that a bell swung right round, mouth up, and held balanced there for a moment, could be controlled to the split second. A band of ringers could then make the bells strike in a different order at every pull: ringing the changes. By 1668, when Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman published Tintinnalogia, it had rules. It is still an almost wholly English art.
Since 1950 ringers have found their towers with Dove's Guide, first compiled by Ronald Dove, who rang at nearly every tower himself. Today the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers publishes it online, with a record for every ring and for 45,974 of the bells in them: weight, note, founder and the year each was cast. It is open data, and it is a wonderful record of English parish life. Here is what it shows.
Each dot is a ring of bells. Search for a tower, or for any city, town or village to see the nearest rings. Colour the dots by the number of bells, by the age of the oldest bell, or by the weight of the tenor (the biggest bell). Hollow dots are rings Dove marks as unringable. Tap a dot for the tower's details, its practice night if it lists one, and a link to its full Dove record.
Of the 7,262 rings, 6,779 are in England, 230 in Wales, 43 on the island of Ireland and just 24 in Scotland. Within England they thicken towards the south and the Midlands. Devon has the most (416), then Somerset (386) and Lincolnshire (347). Measured by area, the densest large counties are Greater London, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, at over nine rings per 100 square kilometres; Northumberland has 0.36.
A fairer test is to ask what share of churches have a ring. OpenStreetMap maps 16,567 Anglican churches in England and Wales, and 6,700 of them (40%) have a Dove ring within 150 metres. In Northamptonshire it is 73%, in Devon 67%. In the far north of England and in north and west Wales it falls to between 6% and 17%: there most parish churches have no ring at all.
The rings are close together. Half of all towers in England and Wales are within 2.3 km of another ring, and 72% within 3 km. The loneliest is at Hugh Town on the Isles of Scilly, 47.5 km from the nearest ring on the mainland.
The typical English ring has six bells: 3,000 rings (41%) do. There are 1,956 rings of eight, 317 of ten and 153 of twelve. Five towers go beyond twelve: Winchester Cathedral has 14, Ossett 15, and St Martin's in Birmingham, Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin and the Bell Tower in Perth, Western Australia, have 16. Most of the extras are semitone bells, which let a band ring a lighter ten or twelve.
At the small end there are 1,831 rings of three to five bells, and they are where the silence is. Dove marks 964 rings (13%) as unringable, and 86% of those are rings of three, four or five: 59% of all rings of three cannot be rung, against 3.1% of sixes and 2.2% of eights.
Big rings are mostly new. Dove does not say when a ring reached its present size, but it does give the year each bell was cast, and a ring cannot be older than its newest bell. For the rings of twelve, the median newest bell was cast in 1999, and 89% have at least one bell cast since 1950. For rings of ten the median is 1978; for eights 1934. The twelve-bell ring, the summit of English ringing, is largely a creation of the last seventy years.
Ringers weigh bells in hundredweights, quarters and pounds: a hundredweight is 112 lb, about 51 kg. The median tenor, the heaviest bell of a ring, is about 10 cwt (526 kg). 517 rings have a tenor of a ton or more, and 21 have one of two tons or more. The heaviest of all is at Liverpool Cathedral: 82-0-11, about 4,171 kg, swung full circle by one ringer on one rope.
The median bell in a ring was cast in 1876. But 1,376 bells still hanging in rings were cast before 1500, most dated by their style rather than an inscription, in 963 different rings. Suffolk has the most (145), then Norfolk (113), Devon (112) and Somerset (111). These bells were cast for swing chiming long before anyone rang changes on them.
The oldest bell with a cast date in Dove's Guide that still hangs in a ring is the fourth of six at Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, dated 1317 and attributed to W Flint.
Dove names 745 founders for the bells in rings. Before 1700 they were many and mostly local, each serving a county or two. In the eighteenth century the Rudhalls of Gloucester cast bells by the thousand (2,411 still hang in rings). In the nineteenth, London's Whitechapel foundry and the Taylors of Loughborough took over, joined by Warner of London and Gillett & Johnston of Croydon.
Between them, Whitechapel (with its earlier owners) and Taylor cast 49% of all the bells in rings today, and 79% of those cast in the twentieth century. Whitechapel's last bells in the data are dated 2017; the foundry closed that year after more than four centuries. Since 2018 Taylor has cast 47% of new bells in rings.
Plot the bells by the year on them and the history of the country rings out. The two biggest single years are 1897, with 443 bells, and 1887, with 388: Queen Victoria's Diamond and Golden Jubilees, each about twice the years around them. The coronation of George VI in 1937 shows the same jump (314 bells against an average of 146 in the years around it), and so do 1902 and 1911.
In 1943 and 1944, not one bell that hangs in a ring today was cast.
The wars are just as clear. From 1915 to 1918 the average fell to 44 a year, against 320 a year in 1910 to 1914. In the Second World War church bells were silenced, to be rung only to warn of invasion: 96 bells from 1940 to 1945, 2 in 1941, 2 in 1942 and none at all in 1943 or 1944. In 1946 there were 217. The busiest decade of all was the 1920s, the decade of the war memorials, with 2,438 bells.
A ring of bells swinging in time puts large forces on a tower, and the frame that holds them matters as much as the bells. Before 1850, 99% of the frames still in use were timber, mostly oak. From the 1870s cast iron took over (58% of frames from 1875 to 1949), and since 1975 most new frames are steel (59%).
3,472 rings list a weekly practice night in Dove, 55% of the ringable ones. 87% are on a Monday to Thursday, with Tuesday just ahead. Hardly anyone practises at the weekend, when the bells are rung for services and weddings. 2,625 rings (36%) are rung from the ground floor, with no ladder to climb, and 262 have a simulator that lets a band practise silently.
Most of these rings hang in listed buildings. 47% of the rings in England are in a Grade I listed building, and 97% are in a listed building of some grade. The commonest dedication is to St Mary (1,347 English rings, 20%), then All Saints (695) and St Peter alone (450). Mary leads among all the churches of the United Kingdom too, with 15% in my saints and wells study, where All Saints came fourth.
170 rings are outside the British Isles, in 16 countries. Australia has 74, the United States 50 across 23 states, New Zealand 12, Canada 10 and South Africa 9. They are mostly big and young: 78% have eight bells or more, and the median newest bell was cast in 1987. The oldest bell in an American ring was cast in 1744 for Christ Church (Old North), Boston; Australia's oldest, at the Bell Tower in Perth, is dated 1725.
Data. Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers, downloaded from the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers on 28 October 2026: the rings file (7,262 rings of three or more bells hung for full-circle ringing, 138 of them lightweight or mini rings), the bells file (45,974 records for bells in those rings, leaving out sanctus and service bells), and the founders and frames files. A tower with two rings counts twice.
Cast years. Dove gives a cast date for 45,691 bells. A single year (sometimes in brackets) counts as dated; "c" dates count as approximate at the year given; a range counts at its midpoint. The year charts use dated bells only; ages and the founders chart use all. Many medieval bells carry Dove's style dates such as c1499, so "before 1500" means "dated or judged to be medieval".
Founders. Foundry families follow the Group column in Dove's founders table: Whitechapel includes the Mears, Lester, Pack, Chapman and Stainbank names; Taylor includes the Taylors of St Neots, Oxford and Loughborough.
Places. Counties by point in polygon with ONS boundaries (ceremonial counties in England, preserved counties in Wales). Churches from OpenStreetMap; a church has a ring if a Dove ring lies within 150 m. Distances between towers on the British National Grid.
Limits. Dove records rings that exist now. Bells recast, sold or melted down are gone from it, so the record of past centuries is a record of survival. Dates of the newest bell are an upper bound on when a ring took its present form, not the date of augmentation. Practice nights are as towers report them and change often; check with the tower before you go.