If you haven’t had a dig around in the different features that BellBoard has, you may be surprised to find out what is available. A few years ago I decided to add all of my quarter peals to the database, and use Bellboard instead of keeping my own records. Although I wouldn’t say that I am interested in statistics, it was quite fun seeing what Bellboard allows you to look up.

For those of you with different names over time, I would definitely recommend using the vertical line “|” to separate each name in the search box – this allows me to search my maiden name and married name at the same time. As well as the list of performances you can also see an analysis by year:

Clearly I’m really a six bell ringer!

And here is the all important analysis of the dates rung:

Having found this, Mark and I thought it would be a good long term project to try and ring a quarter peal on each day of the year, so I put an event in my calendar to ring a quarter peal on the next 29^th February available, and promptly forgot about it for a while.

Roll on to this year, and we found ourselves discussing the features of bellboard in the pub after ringing at Loughborough and we were reminded that this year was a leap year. Brenda and Nicholas who were part of our conversation also said they would be interested in ringing a quarter peal on 29^th February, and so a plan was hatched.

‘Lets ring a quarter peal’ turned into ‘having a quarter peal day’ (you wouldn’t want to arrange only one and not get it!), and we roped in a couple more friends and we soon had a core band of Brenda, Nicholas, Robert, Judith, Mark and myself.

Quarter Peal no.1

Norwich Surprise Minor at Ibstock

This quarter almost came to grief quite near the end as someone fell asleep! But we recovered and scored what was on the whole a very pleasant quarter.

Quarter Peal no.2

Yorkshire Major at Whitwick

The core band was joined by Richard (who also rang in the next one at Thurcaston) plus Liz. Mark chose to ring round the front end here due a blister picked up at Ibstock – saving his hands as much as possible for his conducting duties at the next tower.

For lunch we dropped into the Hare and Hounds in Whitwick – serving typical pub fare that was ideal for the middle of a ringing day.

Quarter Peal no.3

Grandsire Triples at Thurcaston

Another very enjoyable quarter. This time the eighth ringer was Eliza. I got the chance to ringing behind to triples, something I enjoy but haven’t done since 2004!

In the end we scored all three of our quarter attempts, and that’s another date ticked off on the calendar.

Rebecca Banner