"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die"

Tennyson's Wild Bells greeted the new Millennium. Most of them were real bells.

Dr Ramsay, a former Archbishop of York, visiting a Dales parish, heard an amplified recording of church bells and described such a practice as: "One of the most bogus frauds of Christendom."

Throughout the dale-country, teams of bell-ringers squeezed their way up spiral staircases to enter the ringing chambers and take their places in good time to welcome the year 2000. Ilkley prides itself that one of its sons made a profound contribution to bell-ringing.

Jasper Whitfield Snowdon, a vicar's son, who became famous for reviving the art of change-ringing, was born here. Though he died in 1885, his books on bell-ringing are still used.

An enthusiastic Dales ringer, Kit Inman, of Burnsall, in Wharfedale, was a life-long member of the Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers, formed in 1875. Kit, who had a daughter named Belle, died in the 1930s.

The heaviest bell in Yorkshire is surely Great Peter, the ten-ton monster at York Minster and the dominant bell of a ring of 12. When I used to attend best-kept committee meetings at the offices of the Yorkshire Rural Community Council at Purey Cust, near the Minster, there was silence round the table at the approach of noon.

We were all waiting for Great Peter to speak a dozen times. His voice was surely heard right across the city. I have already in this series of letters mentioned Virginia Woolf's theory that the vicar of Giggleswick rang the bells, not just to summon people to worship, but to punish those who stayed away.

Giggleswick was the village where Theodore Brocklehurst, an eccentric vicar of the early part of this century, locked out the bell-ringers. The present Giggleswick team of bell-ringers not only attends on Sundays but occasionally visits the ringing-chambers of other dale-country churches.

In medieval days, the church bells were a vital form of communication, marking the passing hours and also informing parishioners of local happenings, such as a death. Anyone listening to the 'passing bell' could deduce by the sequences whether the dear-departed was male, female or a child.

The sound of the 'passing bell' was said to scare off evil spirits and give the soul of the departed a chance to reach heaven before they could catch it. A visitor to Middleham, in Wensleydale, was told that the sexton rang it.

After the initial peal, a single bell rang out, three times for a man and nine times for a woman. Then there was a slow tolling of the bell. The length of time it rang depended on the generosity or otherwise of the relatives of the dead person. If it soon ended, the relatives had been stingy. At Giggleswick, the passing bell was rung once for a child, twice for a woman and seven times for a man.

When, a few years ago, I visited the church at Askrigg to chat with the bell-ringers, I was surprised at the constricted approach to the bell-tower - and delighted when, the interview over. I stood in the churchyard and recorded the sound of this melodious cluster of six bells.

At Hawes, bell-ropes are among the products at the Ropemakers. The fluffy bits are sallies, which protect the hands of the ringers from possible chafing by the ropes. Bell-ringing has its dangers for the unwary. The learner is taught not to wrap the rope around his wrist. This could lead to an injury to the arm or taking him (or her) up with it as the bell swings.

When I mentioned to Jack Metcalfe, doyen of the Askrigg ringing team, the presence of women in the tower, he told me that women take well to ringing. A 15-year-old girl had just attended her first lesson.

It seems that bell-ringing is rather like learning how to ride a bike. Several operations have to be performed simultaneously or in sequence - in a matter of a second or two. As with car driving, there can be danger for you if you don't know what you're doing.

At quiet times, I have visited church towers on natural history excursions. While not finding bats in the belfry, I was able to study nesting jackdaws - until the parochial church council decided to place wire netting across the windows to deter bird trespassers.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.