Cornish church bells ringing again after £30,000 refurbishment

THE bells of St Sampson’s, South Hill, in Cornwall, silent for greater than 50 years, are ringing once more, after £30,000 was raised to refurbish them.

The five listed bells, 4 dating from 1698 and one from 1831, were dismantled and brought down from the tower in 2021, and kept at John Taylor & Co., in Loughborough.

“We wondered in the event that they’d ever come back again, to be honest,” Judith Ayers, churchwarden, told the Church Times, “because with all the opposite work we now have to do, the bells weren’t really a priority, but were still really vital, they’re very special to the community”.

An assessment found that since the metal was too thin, they were too delicate to be rung using the standard rope-and-clapper method. Instead, electronic static chiming with the installation of an electromagnetic hammer was really helpful.

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 greater than £200,000. Owing to other restoration work needed, equivalent to urgent repairs to the church roof, “there wasn’t much of a choice to be made,” Ms Ayers said.

To critics of the choice, she respond: “They don’t fully understand the situation, and if we hadn’t done it this fashion, our bells would quite likely be sat at Taylor’s, rotting within the corner for ever, they usually’d never have gone back up. So, this can be a way of bringing the old with the brand new, and ensuring that they’re back within the tower where they belong.”

The bells returned in January, and, after an emergency lorry needed to be hired to deliver them, a bunch gathered to welcome them home. “It was wonderful. We had some prosecco left over from a try this was lurking around within 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 may be rung manually, “just by pressing the button”, on the small wall-mounted touchscreen system.

Raising money for the bells is a component of a much greater restoration project costed at greater 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 admittedly completely happy. They must be heard in all their awful glory: it’s a melancholy sound, and you’ll be able to’t retune them, but I quite prefer it. They are what they’re,” Ms Ayers concluded.

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