Bellringing celebrates the joy of weddings and victories, intones the sadness of deaths and funerals, and summons people to church. The casual listener immediately recognises that some bells play hymns, songs and melodies, such as one can hear on the continent (or closer to home at St. Albans Abbey). Those bells are called carillons or chimes. They do not swing and the striking of the clappers is controlled by one person or a machine.

The bells at Sandridge church and in towers like it all over the country produce no recognisable tunes. Yet they are rung in sequences as disciplined and orderly as the stones and timbers of the towers themselves. These bells, rung in an ancient yet very modern way, produce a rich cascade of sound. This is called change ringing.

Change ringing requires special bells, special "music" and ordinary people who enjoy climbing towers and working as a team. The human ingredient is critical because change ringing is very different from playing a carillon or chime. It is not a single person sitting at a keyboard. There are no computers or electronic devices. Change ringing depends on real bells, each swung in a complete circle by a single person: six bells as at Sandridge- six people, twelve bells as at St.Albans Abbey - twelve people, standing in a circle.

The bells are special in several ways. They are large, ranging in weight from a few hundred pounds to several tons. A ring of bells consists of between four and, very rarely, as many as fourteen bronze bells.

Bells for change ringing are hung in stout frames that allow the bells to swing through 360 degrees. Each bell is attached to a wooden wheel with a handmade rope running around it. The mechanism achieves such exquisite balance that ten-year-olds and octogenarians can control the largest bell easily. The harmonic richness of a swinging bell cannot be matched by the same bell hanging stationary but each swinging bell requires one ringer's full attention.

The bells are arranged in the frame so their ropes hang in a circle in the ringing chamber below. Into each rope is woven a tuft of brightly coloured wool (sally), which marks where the ringer must catch the rope while ringing. Bells are rung from the "mouth up" position. With a pull of the rope, the bell swings through a full circle to the "up" position again (handstroke). With the next pull it swings back in the other direction (backstroke).

Because of their great momentum bells take about two seconds to rotate, so they cannot be used to play ordinary "melodic" music. But they can be made to follow one another in order, each ringing once before the first rings again. Ringing bells in a precise relationship to one another is the essence of change ringing. Rung in the order from the lightest, highest pitched bell to the heaviest, the bells strike in a sequence known as rounds, which ringers denote by a row of numbers:
1 2 3 4 5 6

To produce pleasing variations in the sound, bells are made to change places with adjacent bells in the row, for example:

1 2 3 4 5 6
2 1 4 3 6 5
and so on according to various rules known as "methods".


These rows are the musical notation of change ringing. No bell moves more than one place in the row at a time, although more than one pair may change in the same row.
Call changes are a simpler alternative where the swaps take place on command, rather than in a remembered sequence, and may occur only occasionally rather than at every stroke.

THE SANDRIDGE BELLS
Tower bells are first recorded at Sandridge in 1552, when there were three.

Bells (and towers!) have come and gone since, but of the present six the treble (lightest and highest-pitched) dates from 1837 and the other five from 1889. With the exception of the introduction of ball-bearings for the tenor (heaviest bell) and a new headstock for the second made by churchwarden Roland King, the Victorian oak frame and original fittings were still in use until February 2011. Thanks to the generosity of many donors in Sandridge and the bellringing community in Hertfordshire, the bells were retuned at Whitechaple and rehung by Whites of Appleton in time for Easter that  year, and now have an even more pleasing sound and easier "go" (i.e. they are easier and smoother for the ringers to handle).