Quasi listening

Roaming the BBC’s ‘listen again’ schedule, looking for the Shipping Forecast (how like poetry it is) I happened upon a broadcast of a recording of church bells. This is surely worth the price of the licence fee itself, you get a little introduction ‘Today we here from St Mungo’s’ then a history of the tower ‘there have been bells here for a while, then they took them away during World War 2 and melted them down to build the guns on battleships, now they have been restored but still have a range of 27 miles on a clear day’ and finally the tune ‘and today we here ‘a ringing we will go, a dinging we will go, you can’t enforce your ASBO, we ring at dawn you know’. This is followed by, well, bells.

I wasn’t aware there were different tunes. I thought it was like boy band music - all the same. Apparently there are, which possibly explains why campanologists are so highly strung (especially if they forget to let go of the bellpull). I wonder if they have some sort of technical term of dropping a note when clanging bells?