Merrily on High: In Britain, Bell-Ringing's Eternal Peal

The technology is simple but effective. And you don't need Herculean strength: A 12-year-old could set a one-ton bell in motion. There is one thing to bear in mind, however. "Once a bell starts swinging, you can't stop it," said Marks, a 63-year-old retired industrial chemist. "I was at a tower where a rope got under a ringer's arm and lifted her up, and I moved forward and caught her. There are inherent dangers."

In the old days, there was also the risk that a bell would fall off its mount and crash through the ceiling.

At St. Mary's, the ringing chamber is an oddly calm place. Once a sequence starts with the announcement from the first ringer that "treble's going, treble's gone," these campanologists are held in rapt concentration, as they might execute 60 changes in the ringing order over the next few minutes.

The fury in the belfry above is something else entirely. Marks hands me a pair of ear protectors and we take an even narrower, darker stone staircase up two flights, past the belfry to a balcony one floor above. I am thinking of a scene in the old television adaptation of the murder mystery "The Nine Tailors," where the protagonist Lord Peter Wimsey finds himself in a belfry as the bells begin to sound. He faces an agonizing death until his faithful valet rescues him, blood streaming from their ears.

As we stand above the bells, the ringers set them in motion, and I am transfixed by the largest bell, the tenor, wheeling back and forth. At 2,000 pounds, it weighs about the same as the classic VW Beetle, but it is being turned on its back every two seconds.

The sound of all eight bells is unsettling; in addition to the clang of each strike, there seems to be an underlying, throbbing note from some stentorian supernatural force. But the sound is nothing compared with the other sensation, which is of being in an earthquake. The tower is shaking palpably, and the hand reaches, instinctively, for the guardrail.

Shaking is good, apparently; it prevents cracking and damage. But as Haley Barnett, a bell-ringer at Washington National Cathedral, points out: "Noting that and not feeling very strange when you feel the room shaking are two entirely separate things."

Both the cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue and the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue downtown have a ring of 10 bells cast by the famous Whitechapel Foundry in London. On New Year's Eve, Barnett and other members of the Washington Ringing Society plan to sound out the old year with half-muted bells between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. The clappers will be unmuted for a second session at midnight to ring in 2009. The group also plans to ring at an inaugural prayer service on Jan. 21, and awaits permission to ring at the Old Post Office during the inaugural parade the day before, Barnett said.

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In bell-ringing parlance, a "peal" refers to extended ringing that has at least 5,000 changes. It takes about three hours. Momentous peals sometimes are recorded on the walls of a ringing chamber. At St. Mary's, one such plaque announces the "Plain Bob Major" peal marking the wedding of Whitworth to his wife, Ann Newbury, on a summer Saturday in 1964.

Whitworth has been ringing here for 53 years; Marks has been a ringer for 42 years, the last 30 at St. Mary's. The youngest here is 12-year-old Thomas Coles, considered a competent ringer after 18 months of practice.

In spite of a sense of ageless continuity in this room, the role of the church in England has changed dramatically since Whitworth and Marks first pulled a bell. The global Anglican Communion is deeply divided over homosexuality and other issues. And since World War II, successive generations of Britons have stopped attending their official state church.