The Church Clock

The keeping of  the Ashbrittle church clock is undertaken on by Michael Fairfax, Tim Hayward, Philip Wilson & Paul Leyland.

We would like to explain a little bit about what this involves.

The clock is 150 years old and is accessed via a very steep dark and dusty spiral stone staircase.

At the top is a small room lit by a single bare lightbulb.

There are two timber doors one small and the other a little larger.

On opening the larger you are confronted with a splendid looking Heath Robinson blue mechanism.

The smaller door looks down over two floors. This is where the clock weights drop. One weight to power  the clock the other the the chimes.

The main task of the keepers is to raise these weights to the top of the tower which will power the clock and chimes for two days.

The winding is done using two heavy handles.

The chime is cranked around 50 times and the clock around 35.

The chime and the clock are checked regularly throughout the week for accuracy. sadly accuracy is a rare occurrence as 150 year old clocks do not have modern timepiece technology.

As a consequence the clock needs to be constantly adjusted to be remotely correct.

If it’s running fast the pendulum needs to be stalled for a set amount of time. If it’s running slow the clock needs to be wound forward. This is done using a spanner on a small clock face inside the tower. The adjustment is automatically replicated on the large clock face outside.

All this can be done, but for some unbeknown reason, 2 days later it’s running 30 minutes slow.

Potentially causing confusion in the village with misleading chimes.

We are all very happy to wind the clock and are fascinated by the history and the thoughts of who may have wound before us.

That said it can be an arduous task at times and we would welcome any support.

Please do contact us through this site if you’d like to join the volunteer winders or would like to offer any support towards its maintenance.