Killer church bell
Don't anger the bell!
A group of men were delivering a new bell to the church at Rostherne Mere in Cheshire.
They pulled the bell lashed to a cart. The bell was massive and heavy and the lane down to the village narrow and steep. The men sweated and struggled to stop the cart getting away from them.
One of them looked up at the bell in disgust.
“I wish the Devil would take you!”
The bell snapped the ropes that tied it to the cart, rolled off and crushed the man to death. Then it rolled down the hill and flung itself into Rostherne Mere.
The bell has never been found, but sometimes you can hear it ringing moodily under the water.
There are numerous stories of wayward church bells in England. They roll into lakes, leap down wells, get buried under hills and fall into the sea. They’re invariably hard to get out again, sometimes because they’re just bloody-minded, like the Rostherne bell, but sometimes they’re trapped by mermaids, detained by witches or cursed by the use of foul language.
The accepted method of pulling a stubborn church bell out of water is to use a team of pure white oxen hitched to a harness made of yew and rowan wood. Crucially, everyone involved must stay silent while the operation is in progress, but someone always gets over-excited and swears about the devil and the bell dives in again.
St Mary’s Church at Rostherne has a ring of six bells, the earliest dating from 1630. Four of the bells were cast in the 18th Century at the foundry of Rudhall in Gloucester, 127 miles away, so whatever happened on the journey to get them to Rostherne it must have been a pain in the arse.
Rostherne Mere is now a nature reserve, so the bell is safe in its chosen habitat.
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Image collage by Emily Cleaver. Images courtesy of the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers and the British Library, shelfmark Add. 5025. The story of the Rostherne bell from The Lore of the Land, Simpson and Westwood, 2006.