Fine tradition of heavy metal with heavenly sound.

Byline: eryl JONES

THE learned Steven Fry said, "everyone should try everything at least once - with the exception of country music and Morris dancing."

Can't argue with that. I mean who wants to listen to music about dead dogs, wanderlust wives and tramps cadging lifts on trains?

And as for Morris dancing - well, 'nuff said.

I'm sure we all could think of additions to the Fryster's shortlist of loss-of-street-cred activities. From my own point of view, bell ringing would be knocking loudly at the door.

That is until last Monday night. Paul, a new friend and neighbour of mine, is the Tower Captain of the local bellringers. To those of you not au fait with campanological terminology, he is the equivalent of the orchestra conductor.

He kindly invited me to their practice night and gave me a conducted tour of the bell tower. There esconced in reverent order were six bells, cast in 1879. The biggest weighs almost 13 hundredweight - 12 cwt, 3 quarters and 26lb, to be exact (no kilograms here).

There is a fair amount of physics involved when bells of this size are hung and due deference has to be paid to Newton's laws of motion. When they are underway, you have around three tons of ironmongery swinging about' if they all swung the same way at the same time, they would, quite literally, pull over the bell tower.

So they are hung in such a way that one counter balances another. The tunes - or 'methods' as they are called - are very complex and the sequences in which the bells are rung require much concentration.

Which is why I would be no good at it. I watched in fascination as they rang out "bobs", "hunts" and "doubles". You'd be amazed at the number of ways there are to ring six bells.

This fine old rural art is centuries old, and of course, is irrevocably linked to the church. But to these people, this is first and foremost a hobby: they are determined this particular country craft will not go the same way as the wheelwright and the cooper. That's fine by me.

ON A neighbouring farm is a gravestone in the middle of a field, dated December 1865.

It is not the final resting place of a previous occupant of the farm who wished to be buried beneath the land he'd once farmed.

Instead the monument marks the spot where 29 dairy cows, six heifers, nine calves and a bull are interred. They all succumbed to a disease far more deadly than foot-and-mouth - cattle plague, or rinderpest.

Rinderpest was the scourge of European cattle herds for over a millennium and a half and the outbreak of 1865-66, which killed the small herd buried here, also accounted for over 324,000 cattle in the UK.

No need for compulsory slaughter with this killer. The time span between healthy cow and dead cow was around 24 hours.

Thankfully, that was the last major outbreak of the disease and it was finally eradicated in 1877.

Whether it was sadness or pride in his herd that motivated that farmer to put up a memorial to his herd, we'll never know. But it does serve as a timely reminder to us all.

Our forefathers may not have had quotas or red tape or reams of forms to fill in. But compared to what they had to put up with, by hell, do we have it cushy.

Who wants music about dead dogs, wanderlust wives and tramps cadging lifts on trains?