THE bells of St Sampson’s, South Hill, in Cornwall, silent for more than 50 years, are ringing once again, after £30,000 was raised to refurbish them.
The five listed bells, four dating from 1698 and one from 1831, were dismantled and taken down from the tower in 2021, and kept at John Taylor & Co., in Loughborough.
“We wondered if they’d ever come back again, to be honest,” Judith Ayers, churchwarden, told the Church Times, “because with all the other work we have to do, the bells weren’t really a priority, but were still really important, they’re very special to the community”.
An assessment found that because the metal was too thin, they were too delicate to be rung using the conventional rope-and-clapper method. Instead, electronic static chiming with the installation of an electromagnetic hammer was recommended.
The cost of restoring the bells for stationary electronic static chiming was about £30,000, but restoring them for full-circle ringing would have cost more than £200,000. Owing to other restoration work needed, such as urgent repairs to the church roof, “there wasn’t much of a decision to be made,” Ms Ayers said.
To critics of the decision, she respond: “They don’t fully understand the situation, and if we hadn’t done it this way, our bells would quite likely be sat at Taylor’s, rotting in the corner for ever, and they’d never have gone back up. So, this is a way of bringing the old with the new, and making sure that they are back in the tower where they belong.”
The bells returned in January, and, after an emergency lorry had to be hired to deliver them, a group gathered to welcome them home. “It was wonderful. We had some prosecco left over from a do that was lurking around in the shed. So we cracked open an impromptu couple of bottles of Prosecco, which was quite exciting,” Ms Ayers said.
The bells are programmed to ring on Sunday mornings before the service. They have a funeral and wedding toll, and can be rung manually, “just by pressing the button”, on the small wall-mounted touchscreen system.
Raising money for the bells is part of a much bigger restoration project costed at more than £1 million. So far, £720,000 has been raised, of which a portion was for the bells. St Sampson’s also received a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
“We have our bells back, ringing out their unique sounds, and it’s wonderful. We are so pleased, and the community is really happy. They need to be heard in all their awful glory: it’s a melancholy sound, and you can’t retune them, but I quite like it. They are what they are,” Ms Ayers concluded.
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