Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in The Callum Valley ·
Why the Big Bell Is Told First
In Callum Valley nobody consults the parish clock because the tenor bell is informed of the hour before the parish is, and the telling has a keeper and a charge.
- status: folklore
Every soul in this valley knows you do not look at the clock to know the hour. You wait for the big bell, the tenor, the one they call Old Nan up the north end, and when Old Nan speaks the hour is set, whatever the clock on the gable says, because the clock says it second. That is not laziness and it is not custom for its own good looks. There is a reason, and the reason has a keeping.
Before Old Nan rings, Old Nan is told. The parish is not. The telling goes the other way round, and always has, back to when the bells were first hung and lazier men than us were already arguing about it. Somewhere between the hour turning and the first swing, someone or something goes round to the tower and puts the hour into the bell like a coin into a hand, and the bell takes it, weighs it, and passes it down the valley for the rest of us. We are the second to know in our own parish. The bell is the first.
My grandfather kept the telling straight: he said the tower is the parish's mouth and not its ear, which is why nothing up there listens to us. He said the telling is done by a walker who comes up the field path behind the churchyard, always after dark, always at the pace of a man carrying something full, and that he has never been seen over the wall because the wall is not what he crosses. My mother said that was nonsense and there was no walker, only the wind going round before the hour the way water will. Both of them died convinced of their own version, and neither of them will tell you the hour now, so the argument stands unresolved as far as the family is concerned.
What I can give you is the valley's own account, which every household keeps without knowing it keeps anything. On the nights the telling runs, the clocks go first a little wrong by a little amount, not enough to matter, and then Old Nan speaks and the clocks fall true behind her, one by one, up the row of houses, like lamps coming on down a street at dusk. Watch the gable clock over the smithy any clear night. It will be adrift for four minutes past the hour and then something reaches it and it is no longer adrift. That reaching is the telling arriving. The bell has been told, the bell has spoken, and the telling is still in the valley on its rounds, called the clearing, and no one here waits up for it.
There is a charge attached, and the charge is why children up here are not sent on errands at the hour's turning. If you are in the field path behind the churchyard when the telling comes up it, you will be spoken to instead of the bell, and the hour will be put into you, and you will ring it for the rest of your days in whatever tower you end in, and there are three names in the church register of the men it is said happened to. The parish records the men as ringers of great natural gift. The parish would. The parish was not there.
Who tells it today: I do. Matt Corrigan, sheep-washer, born in this valley and not leaving it for the telling or anything else. I tell it at the fire in the lambing shed mostly, to men who have heard it before and want it in the proper words. And I will tell you the last of it the way my grandmother gave it over, and she had it from the sexton's mother herself, so it comes sound: the bell is told the hour first because somebody has to know the hour before the hour arrives, and it cannot be any of us, because we would only go and tell it wrong.