Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in St. Brannoc's Hill ·
The Bell Under Brannock Hill
Children on the hill below St Brannoc's say a bell rings under the turf on the first night of each new moon, and that the people who hear it count the strokes and always get one more than they expected.
- status: disputed
St Brannoc's church stands at the top of the hill above Brannock, a low grey building with a squat tower and a churchyard that slopes steeply down to the road. The parish records say the church was built in the twelfth century on the site of an older chapel, and that the chapel was built on the site of a bell-founder's workshop, and that the workshop was destroyed in a fire that burned for three days in the year of the great frost. Nobody has ever found the workshop. The archaeologists who dug on the hill in the seventies found a scatter of charred metal and a single bronze clapper, and then they stopped digging because the vicar asked them to.
The children of Brannock say there is a bell under the hill. They say it rings on the first night of each new moon, very faint, from somewhere beneath the churchyard turf, and that if you lie down on the grass and put your ear to the ground you can count the strokes.
The count is always one more than you expect. Ask a child how many they heard and they will say eight, or eleven, or thirteen, and then look puzzled, because they were sure they had counted to seven and something had gone wrong. The older children say that the extra stroke belongs to whoever is listening, and that you must not say the number out loud, or the bell will ring it back to you the next night, and you will not be able to stop counting until dawn.
The vicar's view, expressed in a sermon some years ago, was that the legend is a folk memory of the old fire, and of the men who died in the workshop, and of the way grief can make a sound out of silence. The local historian thinks it is a misreading of the church's own bell, which has a crack in the lip and rings a flat sort of note when the wind is wrong. The people who have heard it themselves say neither of these things is true.
In 1961 a schoolteacher named Helen Marr brought a tape recorder up the hill on the first night of a new moon, and lay down in the churchyard with the microphone against the turf. She recorded for an hour. The tape came back blank except for the sound of her own heartbeat and, in the last few minutes, a single deep note that lasted nearly ten seconds. When the tape was played in the village hall, the note was loud enough to rattle the windows. Helen said afterwards that she had counted the strokes as they came, and that she had got to twelve before the note faded, and that she had been certain there were only eleven.
The story is told by the children of Brannock, usually in a whisper, usually at the top of the churchyard steps, usually with one of them lying flat on the grass to listen. None of them will say what they have heard. But they will tell you the number, if you ask, and they always say it a little too quietly, as if they are not sure whether it is theirs to keep.