| Bells of Wilton wake residents of Australia | |
|  | | David J. Kelly Secretary of The Keltek Trust |
| | The residents of a city in Australia will awake to the sounds of the bells of a Wiltshire church this Christmas.
It is a sound they have been waiting to hear for over 70 years. |
| | | This Christmas the bells from a Wiltshire church will be waking up the residents of a city in Australia.
For over 70 years the residents of Lismore, New South Wales have been waiting to hear the peal of bells.
By the end of this year their wait will be over.
The project has taken over two years and is the work of The Keltek Trust.
This Wiltshire based charity acts as a dating agency with the simple premise to ‘buy bells at risk and then find new homes for them."
Easier said than done.
With bells ranging in size from 12kg to over a tonne and from the diameter of a dinner plate to over 50 inches and coming in numerous notes finding the perfect match is no easy task.
For parishioners in Lismore, Australia a match however has been found.
 | | St. Andrews in Australia will ring out with Wilton's six bells by the end of the year. |
Their church, St. Andrews, has sported a bell tower strong enough to carry a peal of eight bells since 1934 but it was a bell tower with out bells.
On the other side of the world, St. Marys and St. Nicholas in the small town of Wilton, were having their six bells replaced as part of the Ringing in the Millennium scheme.
Wilton’s redundant bells however would not be redundant for long.
They were snapped up by St. Andrews, despite being older then the church itself, and shipped out to Australia at the end of last year.
Due to be installed by the end of the November the 170-year-old Wilton bells will become the third oldest peal of bells in Australia.
The Wilton bells are just one example of over 200 bells the Keltek Trust have found homes for in the past 10 years.
Bells which would previously have been broken down and sold for scrap metal.
 | | Some of the bells rescued by the Keltek Trust |
"We believe in conservation by re-use," says David Kelly the Trust’s secretary.
With a capital fund the trust buys unwanted bells for more then their scrap metal value and offers them at cost to organisations looking for bells.
And it is not just churches that benefit.
One of the largest bells the trust has handled is a one tonne bell destined for the top of a mountain in the Orkneys.
As part of an arts project the bell will hang at the top of the peak ready for walkers to strike when they make it to the summit.
Not only are bells rescued from redundant churches but recently from out at sea.
Ex-Trinity House buoy bells were picked up by the trust from a scrap metal dealer in the East End of London.
The buoy bells moored all along the coast of Wales and England in the early 1900s had been warning ships with a bell toll every bit as good as a church bell.
Rescued by the trust they have found homes in churches across the country and have even found there way into the sanctus of a cathedral in Vancouver, Canada.
With the closure of hundreds of churches in England over the last decade the trust is always looking for more funding to finance their work.
If you would like to make a donation or want further information please contact the Keltek Trustor click here to link through to their website.
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The Bell Rescue Fund was established in 1998 to help churches to acquire rings of bells or to augment existing rings. 
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