I DROVE to Skipton High Street for a meal out at 5.20pm on Friday, June 3 expecting it to be a hive of activity on the Jubilee Bank Holiday.

Yet the High Street was virtually empty – lots of empty car park spaces on the Setts. Why? Could it have been that the Holy Trinity Church bells were ringing? For four hours!? Yes - from 3pm till 7 pm those bells rang.

“The moaning and groaning of the bells,” Edgar Allan Poe once wrote. Is this a long established tradition? Well, no, not really - no British monarch celebrated a jubilee until George III in 1809. Westminster Abbey had only tolled its formidable bells for 40 minutes earlier in the day.

The weather was good yet sitting outside cafes, bars and pubs anywhere near Holy Trinity was just a nightmare – a recipe for a migraine. Owners of those hospitality venues on the High Street were tearing their hair out as their customers left seeking refuge as far away as possible from the cacophony. Celebrate our monarch’s exceptional record of public service by all means – and, indeed, use our lovely church bells. But for four hours – surely not!

Phil Lee

Elslack

(Note: The Craven Herald reported that the bells of Holy Trinity Church were rung twice on the day of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation on June 2, 1953 - from 9am to 10am, and again at 5pm to 6pm. Bellringers included a Miss M Evans - believed to be the first time a woman had taken part in a coronation ringing at the church.