Method Diagrams

These diagrams were made for use in our 6 bell tower where most of us began learning to ring in 2001 in a village where the bells were restored after 30 years of silence. We generated the diagram itself from our program !Methods and added extras such as what happens at a Bob or a Single using various books and the !Draw package. All diagrams fit on to an A4 size page; if you have a printer which takes larger paper, the diagrams can be scaled without loss of resolution. Click here to see an example page.

They contain coloured lines so look better printed on a colour printer. They can be printed on a printer with black ink and you can use a felt tip pen to colour over the lines which should be coloured. Please let us know if you find any mistakes.

Each diagram page is made up of three basic parts:

• At the top left is the circle of work showing where each bell starts as a number inside a bell and, in green the places where you pass the treble. Which stroke you are on when passing the treble is indicated by H for hand and B for back and may be followed by an arrow to show whether you are going up or down at the time.
• At the top right is a table showing what to do at a Bob or Single. There is a column showing the immediate work needed and another column showing what your next work will be on the circle.
• Below these are the “blue line” diagrams for each bell (other than the treble or covering tenor) ringing a plain course of the method. The places where you pass the treble (a red line) are shown with green ellipses. The letters “A”, “B” and “D” refer to the “After” bell which takes you off the lead, the “Before” (or Course) bell which you take from the lead and the “Dodging” bell.
• There are often some explanatory notes on the notation and on the “Front work” and “Back work”.

The diagrams may be freely downloaded from here for personal use as a zipped archive in two formats:

• Rdraw.zip, ( 233 K) Drawfile format for RISCOS users; there is an index.htm inside the zipped archive.
• Index, to the files in PDF format for other systems. PDF stands for Page Description Format; a PDF (Acrobat) reader is freely available from the Adobe website for PCs

Available methods:

• Plain Hunt on 4 and on 5 bells
• Stedman Singles
• Minimus
  • Plain Bob
• Doubles
  • Cloister Doubles
  • Plain Bob Doubles, Reverse Canterbury Doubles
  • Grandsire Doubles
  • St. Simons Doubles, St. Martins Doubles
  • Stedman Doubles
• Minor
  • Plain Bob Minor
  • St. Clements Minor
• Triples
  • Plain Bob
  • Grandsire