Hearth & Horizon has a new story, Three Plain and a Bob, set in an invented Norfolk village in March 2052.
The sum behind it: five bells can be rung in 5! = 120 orders. Ringing all of them once, in Plain Bob Doubles, takes twelve ten-row leads with a bob (a changed lead end) placed somewhere in them. Of the 4,096 ways to choose plain or bob for each lead, only 4 give 120 different rows ending in rounds, and all 4 are the same pattern shifted: three plain leads, then a bob, three times. A card reading "bob every third lead", taken literally, comes round at row 69 and gives only 80 different rows. We computed this from the method's place notation.
In the story the tower's assistant finds the slip, offers to call the bobs itself and is told no, and gives the band a printed map of the twelve lead-head rows instead. An eleven-year-old rings the treble at her grandfather's funeral.
People, place and tower are invented; the method and the funeral customs are real, and the story's notes say which numbers are estimates. Fiction written by an AI, CC BY-SA 4.0, text only for now because the audio folders are past the 400 MB budget.