St. Mary's Church and Its Famous Bell Cage
The Church of St Mary the Virgin was built in the 15th and 16th centuries, but is well known for the absence of a tower or spire to house the bells. Work began on a tower in 1525, but Cardinal Wolsey's fall from grace in 1530 brought construction to a halt and the following year a wooden bell cage was erected in the churchyard. This temporary structure still exists although not in its original position. It was moved from the south to the north side of the church in the 17th century because the occupant of Old Hall objected to the noise of the bells. The bells are exceptional in that they are not rung from below by ropes attached to wheels, as is usual in change ringing, but the headstock is manipulated by hand by ringers standing beside the bells.
The bells are believed to be the heaviest five (A, G, F#, E, and D) that are rung in England today, with a weight of 4ΒΌ tons.
Read more about this topic: East Bergholt
Famous quotes containing the words mary, church, famous, bell and/or cage:
“Miss Mary Emerson is here,—the youngest person in Concord, though about eighty,—and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; earnest to know of your inner life; most stimulating society; and exceedly witty withal. She says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. I wish you could see her.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the ultimate conceivable corruption. It has possessed the will to the final corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity: it has turned every value into a disvalue, every truth into a falsehood, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake these echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again ...”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Hollywood has always been a cage ... a cage to catch our dreams.”
—John Huston (1906–1987)