Saltfleetby All Saints

[Ted Steele]

A recent submission to the Churchcrawlers list illustrates Saltfleetby 
All saints, a redundant Lincolnshire church  in the care of the Churches 
Conservation Trust. One picture shows three bells chained together in 
the empty nave and it is said that another can be seen through a 
trapdoor in the tower.

The National Bell Register shows five bells, all by John III Harrison of 
1799 and these would be the five listed in my 3rd edition Dove (1962) as 
apparently ringable except for an unsafe tower (it leans considerably). 
The eighth edition of 1994 has them as "chiming only" but they have 
disappeared altogether from the 9th edition of 2000 and are not included 
in a list in that edition of CCT churches with bells. I expected to find 
them on Towerbase, which includes many lost rings, but they are not 
there either. I discovered from the list of lost rings on the Keltek 
site that the bells were rehung for chiming only in 1975, which solves 
the mystery of why I couldn't find them elsewhere, but I wonder now; 
when and why were three of them taken down, and are the other two still 
in the tower? I expect someone on the list will know.

Ted