What ringers mean by a "method"

Walk into a ringing chamber on a practice night and you will hear a language that sounds almost like code. "Plain Bob Minor, go Grandsire." "That's a bob, follow me." "Stand." Underneath all of it sits one simple idea, and once you have hold of that idea, the rest starts to unfold.

The bells begin in rounds — the treble leading, the tenor at the back, every bell striking once per row. A row is simply the order in which the bells sound at that blow. A change is where two neighbouring bells swap places. A method is a named, memorised sequence of changes, rung over and over until the conductor calls "that's all".

That is the whole thing. Methods have names — Plain Bob, Grandsire, Stedman, Cambridge Surprise — and they are shared across Britain, so a ringer from Devon can walk into a tower in Yorkshire, hear "Plain Bob Minor" called, and know exactly what to do. On six bells there are 720 possible rows; ring them all without repetition and you have rung an extent. A quarter peal of Minor is 1,260 changes, roughly three-quarters of an hour. A full peal of 5,040 takes nearer three hours, and the band will not leave the tower until it is done.

The skills to build before you tackle any method

Methods, oddly, are the easy part. The hard part is handling a bell well enough that your hands can work without your full attention. Before you ask to be taught a method, you should be able to:

• Ring up and ring down safely, and set your bell without help.
• Ring rounds for ten or fifteen minutes without your rope wandering off the line or your bell checking at the balance.
• Strike accurately on both handstroke and backstroke, keeping a steady rhythm with the rest of the band.
• Hear your own bell inside the row, notice when you are late or early, and correct it.
• Follow the bell you are ringing after, and follow the treble as it moves.

If any of those are shaky, stay on them a while longer. A ringer who cannot hear themselves will never place a dodge correctly, however well they know the diagram.

Call changes and plain hunt: the road in

Almost every beginner learns call changes first, and rightly so. The conductor calls a swap — "three to four" — and those two bells change places at the next handstroke. Nothing is memorised; you simply learn to move on command, hold your place when you are not called, and listen to the bell you are following. It teaches timing, which is the real currency of a ringing chamber.

Then comes plain hunt, the foundation stone of all change ringing. Each bell moves one place per row: up towards the back, then down towards the front, then up again. On six bells, the treble hunts out to the back and back to lead in twelve rows. Learn it on the treble first, because the treble's path is the simplest and you can watch the others while you ring it.

Your first proper method

The traditional first method is Plain Bob Doubles: five bells working, with the tenor covering behind at every row. It is built from three small pieces of work — making seconds, dodging in thirds and fourths, and leading — repeated in a fixed order. That is all it is. The trick is not to memorise rows but to learn the shape your bell takes through the method.

Draw the blue line, the wavy path your bell follows on the diagram. Learn one lead at a time rather than the whole thing in one sitting. Once Plain Bob Doubles is comfortable, Plain Bob Minor follows naturally, and from there the door opens onto Grandsire and the Surprise methods.

You will also need to know the calls. A bob or a single changes the pattern at a fixed point in the lead, and the conductor will shout it in good time — "Bob!" — so you can prepare. Learn what the bob does to your particular bell before you meet it in the tower.

Learning away from the tower

• Write the blue line out by hand. It sinks in far better than reading it.
• Use a ringing simulator or bell-handling software if your tower has one, and ring the method in slow motion until the shape is automatic.
• Ring it on handbells, or simply tap it out on a table, saying the places aloud.
• Practise in short, frequent bursts. Ten minutes on four days beats two hours on a Sunday.
• Ring the method in your head while waiting for a bus. If you can do that, you can do it in the tower.

Joining the local band

Your tower captain or ringing master will decide when you are ready to join the band for a method, and that judgement is worth trusting. Turn up to practice night regularly — half the skill is simply knowing how a band breathes together. Arrive early, help coil ropes, and be honest about what you can and cannot ring. Nobody minds a ringer who says "I would rather stay on rounds tonight"; everybody minds one who pretends.

Expect it to take months, not weeks, and expect to have bad evenings. Every ringer in the country has stood in a tower, completely lost, while the bells carried on without them. Then one night the pattern clicks, your bell goes exactly where it should, and you understand why people give up their evenings to this for forty years.