| Bells
of Wilton wake residents of Australia |
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| David
J. Kelly Secretary of The Keltek Trust |
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The
residents of a city in Australia will awake to the sounds of the bells
of a Wiltshire church this Christmas.
It is a sound they have been waiting to hear for over 70 years. |
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This Christmas
the bells from a Wiltshire church will be waking up the residents
of a city in Australia.
For over 70 years the residents of Lismore, New South Wales have been
waiting to hear the peal of bells.
By the end of this year their wait will be over.
The project has taken over two years and is the work of The Keltek
Trust.
This
Wiltshire based charity acts as a dating agency with the simple premise
to ‘buy bells at risk and then find new homes for them."
Easier said than done.
With bells ranging in size from 12kg to over a tonne and from the
diameter of a dinner plate to over 50 inches and coming in numerous
notes finding the perfect match is no easy task.
For
parishioners in Lismore, Australia a match however has been found.
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| St.
Andrews in Australia will ring out with Wilton's six bells by
the end of the year. |
Their
church, St. Andrews, has sported a bell tower strong enough to carry
a peal of eight bells since 1934 but it was a bell tower with out
bells.
On the other side of the world, St. Marys and St. Nicholas in the
small town of Wilton, were having their six bells replaced as part
of the Ringing in the Millennium scheme.
Wilton’s redundant bells however would not be redundant for long.
They were snapped up by St. Andrews, despite being older then the
church itself, and shipped out to Australia at the end of last year.
Due to be installed by the end of the November the 170-year-old Wilton
bells will become the third oldest peal of bells in Australia.
The Wilton bells are just one example of over 200 bells the Keltek
Trust have found homes for in the past 10 years.
Bells which would previously have been broken down and sold for scrap
metal.
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| Some
of the bells rescued by the Keltek Trust |
"We believe
in conservation by re-use," says David Kelly the Trust’s secretary.
With a capital fund the trust buys unwanted bells for more then their
scrap metal value and offers them at cost to organisations looking
for bells.
And it is not just churches that benefit.
One of the largest bells the trust has handled is a one tonne bell
destined for the top of a mountain in the Orkneys.
As part of an arts project the bell will hang at the top of the peak
ready for walkers to strike when they make it to the summit.
Not only are bells rescued from redundant churches but recently from
out at sea.
Ex-Trinity House buoy bells were picked up by the trust from a scrap
metal dealer in the East End of London.
The buoy bells moored all along the coast of Wales and England in
the early 1900s had been warning ships with a bell toll every bit
as good as a church bell.
Rescued by the trust they have found homes in churches across the
country and have even found there way into the sanctus of a cathedral
in Vancouver, Canada.
With the closure of hundreds of churches in England over the last
decade the trust is always looking for more funding to finance their
work.
If you would like to make a donation or want further information please
contact the Keltek Trust
or click here
to link through to their website.
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The Bell Rescue Fund was established in 1998 to help churches
to acquire rings of bells or to augment existing rings. 
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