Each year, Winchester Cathedral’s Education centre invites all the Diocese’s Church Primary Schools to send their final year (Year 6) pupils for a day’s learning about the Cathedral and its activities, culminating in a ‘Leavers Day’ service. This year over three days in June, more than 1,600 children from 50 schools each took part in two morning ‘workshops’ split into groups of no more than 20 pupils. An army of cathedral volunteers organised activities including brass-rubbing, calligraphy, gargoyles, stone-carving, and tapestries, but this year a new addition was the provision of three types of bell-ringing workshops.

These comprised -

1. a trip up the tower to the ringing chamber with an opportunity to ring a muffled bell at backstroke, ringing demonstration, and quiz
2. handbell ringing and learning the principal of plain hunting
3. an experience of the Lichfield Diocesan Mobile Belfry, installed on the Close lawn, where children were shown how to ring, given demonstrations and were ‘walked’ through plain hunting

 
All these activities had to fit into a tight timetable of 45 minutes per workshop