Anton Spice measured 2025 in bell strikes and ancient ice.
‘Feeble was the sound they made … on frozen nature’s winter omnipotence.’
I’ve spent the last few months of the year reading the 600-page epic Independent People by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness. First published in 1934, it follows the fortunes – or more accurately misfortunes – of shepherd and farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses, who spends much of the book and the decades it tracks fighting in vain to retain a very particular version of his independence, often to the dismay and suffering of those around him.
Independent People is a book about the crushing inevitability of capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, about the power of superstition, nature, industry, politics and economics being greater or more irresistible than the power of the individual. Life on Bjartur’s remote croft in the Icelandic countryside begins in myth and magic and ends in debt and legislation. Progress pokes at the edges of his world and then marches straight through it. A road is built, Christianity is taught, local economic systems are replaced by wider co-operatives, and the effects of war and revolution ruffle a community that was until then entirely self-contained. America appears on the horizon. Loans accumulate. Sheep, cows and children are born, raised, and buried. And throughout it all the only thing that seems to make life worth living is drinking inexplicable quantities of coffee.
I don’t live on a remote Icelandic croft, but I do feel like rapid change driven by forces beyond my control is accelerating. As a writer, I feel like I am being constantly asked to adapt and adjust my relationship to the to the tools I use and account for the work I do. And I too feel a Bjartur-like resistance rising in my chest whenever I am asked to contend with its coming impact. In response, I’ve found myself drawn to longer arcs.
In November, I made a trip to the John Taylor & Co. bell foundry in Loughborough, which is the last remaining bell foundry in the United Kingdom. The workshop and tuning rooms feel Victorian. The casting hall, positively medieval. Forges are atavistic places, the elements in which they trade outdate the bells they cast and outdate the very notion of time that we cast bells to keep. Return clients at the foundry can be three or more generations apart. Most of the cathedrals in the UK have had their bells restored in the last hundred years, and as such won’t need them looked at for another few hundred. New bells are not in demand, but I have come to see a casting.
It’s cold up on the gallery. I am a good thirty years younger than everyone else here. Below us, a furnace burns green hot. Fired up to a temperature of over 2000 degrees Celsius. We wait in anticipation for the temperature to reach the requisite level. One by one, the founders enter the room, nodding to one another that the time has come. They gather around the furnace, pull visors down over their eyes and gloves up to their elbows. Their movements are choreographed and perfectly timed. The molten metal is tipped on a pivot into a large vat that is suspended from the gantry. Sparks fly and smoke rises.
Once the final drops have been poured, the vat is winched down the centre of the room towards a sand pit, where the chimney of a bell mould is poking out of the ground. John Taylor are one of the few foundries to still cast their bells underground, a nod to the itinerant founders who used to travel the countryside, digging holes and casting bells in churchyards as they went. The founders assume their positions. The wheel is turned and the vat tips forwards, slowly emptying its contents into the top of the mould. Instructions are given to speed up. The regularity of the pour is essential to ensure consistency in the metal, and therefore also consistency in the tone. Solid turned liquid turned solid. The bells are made to withstand up to a quarter of a million strikes a year. For hundreds of years. Millions of strikes. Everything about them speaks to a scale beyond the human. Rarely seen, always heard. Too heavy to move, too solid to break, exhumed from the earth like ancient relics in an act of high ceremony. Archaeology in reverse.
There are 8,760 hours a year. If a bell strikes the time of each hour, it will strike 156 times a day and 56,940 times a year. According to the Office for National Statistics, I will live to be an average of 84 years old. Such a bell could toll 4,782,960 times in my lifetime. After which it could outlive me by a thousand years.
Shortly before my trip to the foundry, I spent a day at the British Antarctic Survey ice core laboratory in Cambridge to record the sound of the world’s oldest ice being melted and analysed. Scientists use ice cores to reconstruct the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature change that has been the basis for our understanding of human-made global heating. Until last year the longest continuous ice core record dated back 800,000 years. This ice is thought to be double that, anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million years old.
At this age, the ice has been extracted from a depth of several kilometres, each centimetre of which is said to account for roughly 500 years of highly compressed snowfall. The samples are cut to size and fitted vertically into a plexiglass scaffold and slowly lowered onto a hot plate where the air bubbles and water droplets are separated for analysis. It gurgles as it goes. The ice is melted at 1.5 centimetres a minute, meaning that every hour, 45,000 years of environmental history melts away before my eyes. So how many bells is that?
Ice cores are regularly referred to as archives because the molecular information they contain take us back in time. Since the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels have rocketed to heights not seen in a million years. The scientists at BAS are now just waiting for the temperatures to catch up. Maybe Bjartur was right. Time for another coffee.
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Find Anton Spice’s previous work on Caught by the River here, and follow him on Instagram here.