Peebles Bellringers Group

The church bells are rung every single Sunday of the year at 9.30 am until 10 am. This would be prior to the start of the service in Peebles Old in normal times. Now, with the physical church services being suspended the ringing bells are also incorporated into the online services using recordings.

Currently we have 10 ringers in our group. The bells are rung by only one person so during the Covid-19 lockdown, we have been able to continue ringing the bells each Sunday and this has brought a great deal of joy and reassurance to the community at large. In addition, we rang on a Wednesday throughout the full lockdown period, providing a selection of different tunes for all to enjoy.

We ring during Beltane Week, for the Christmas Lights Switch-on and on St Andrews Day. Any inhabitant of the town who has a 100th birthday can request a short ringing to celebrate the occasion. Just contact Anne on 01721 721075 for details and it is helpful to have a little notice if you wish us to do this.

Each ringer has their own repertoire and we like to think that we are improving our skills all the time.

We always welcome people who are interested in ringing. If you can read music, it’s very straightforward as the keyboard levers are the same as those on a piano, minus some of the ‘black’ keys. Because of this, and because there are only 13 bells, we can’t ring every tune but we can usually adapt unless that destroys the tune completely. Even if you can’t read music, if you have a good ear you can still ring as we have quite a resource of music written by a previous ringer who didn’t read music.