This Bronze Chime Has Everyone Obsessed: It Sounds Like Real Music

Sea Turtle Wind Chime - ADV
– CraftingFolk
Advertorial
"Most chimes you buy in a shop don't sing — they jingle." Why a 67-year-old former marine conservation officer on the Yorkshire coast is selling her last hand-tuned bronze wind chimes at cost, before she closes her workshop.
Margaret "Nell" Pearce in the workshop at Filey where she has tuned bronze wind chimes for the last six years.
Two streets from the seafront in Filey, North Yorkshire, there is "a small workshop behind her cottage above the sea". Margaret "Nell" Pearce is 67. She was a Marine Conservation Officer with the Marine Conservation Society from 1987 to 2021 — loggerhead and leatherback turtle sightings logged off the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire coast, nesting data filed, every recorded UK sighting cross-referenced before sunrise. For the last six years, only bronze wind chimes.
She does not play them. She tunes them, hangs them from the garden beam, and waits for the wind to come off the sea.
There is a final batch left in the workshop. After that, she stops.
the sound she couldn’t find in a shop
In June 2021, four weeks after she retired, Nell bought three wind chimes at a gift shop on the Scarborough seafront. Different sizes, different brands, all of them advertised as "coastal." She hung them from the garden beam and sat in her chair after dinner for two weeks. None of them sounded like the coast. They sounded like keys on a kitchen counter.
At the end of the second week, she took all three down. On the wall beside the back door, there was a small bronze ship's bell a previous tenant of the cottage had left behind in 1994. Nell tapped it with her fingernail. The bell rang for almost a full minute. The sound moved down the garden and out towards the sea.
The bronze ship's bell on the garden beam at Nell's cottage — the sound she couldn't find in a shop.
"If a bronze bell from the nineteen-nineties sounded more like the North Sea than three new chimes from a seafront gift shop, somebody was getting bronze wrong."
She drove to the builders' merchant in Scarborough the next morning and bought a blowtorch and a length of bronze stock. "I burned through forty pounds of bronze before the first tube held a note," she says. "And another forty before I learned to stop holding the torch like a flashlight." By the end of 2021 the garage had a workbench, a vise, and a wire rack of bronze tubes.
The first finished chime came out in March 2022. Four hand-cut tubes. One mother turtle on top — the animal she'd spent thirty-four years tracking through Marine Conservation Society records, following every loggerhead and leatherback sighting off the Yorkshire coast. Five hatchlings below. "I hung it next to the ship's bell on the garden beam," she says. "The bell was still louder. But the chime had something the bell didn't — five tubes talking to each other." By 2023, the workshop made nothing else.
what it sounds like when the wind comes off the sea
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On the garden beam at Filey at dawn — tap to hear the wind play it.
A bronze chime sounds nothing like the painted-aluminium tube chimes most gardens end up with. Bronze sustains. Each strike rings — and keeps ringing — for close to a full minute. The four tubes overlap and bleed into one another. The chicks rattle softly underneath. The dome above the tubes catches the sound and pushes it down into the garden instead of letting it scatter.
In a light afternoon breeze , three or four overlapping notes a minute, with the sustain holding on between strikes. In a steady evening wind off the sea , the tubes start trading the lead and the smaller chimes come in underneath like a slow rattle. In a coastal gale , the chime moves into full chord and stays there until the wind drops.
"I spent thirty-four summers listening to the North Sea teach me what a coast sounds like. The chime is what I learned, set in bronze."
Nell's own chime has hung on the same garden beam for four years. It has not come inside once. When the wind comes off the sea at dusk, she sits at the kitchen window with a cup of tea and listens.
"When the wind comes off the sea at dusk, she sits at the kitchen window with a cup of
tea and listens."
the drawer of cards in the workbench
Nell keeps the cards in the top drawer of the workbench, directly above the bench vise. Postcards, folded notes, the occasional photograph. She pulled the drawer open when I asked to see them.
"I don't open the drawer often," she said. "Every now and then, when a tube isn't coming to gauge, I do."
She set three on the workbench.
The top drawer of the workbench above the vise.
The first was from a woman named Anne in Whitby, who had hung her chime from the beam of her holiday cottage in late September. The first proper North Sea storm came through in October, late at night. She had opened the back door and stood barefoot in the doorway for the full twenty minutes the chime was in chord, and then posted Nell a folded card the following week. The card said: "I have lived on this coast for forty-one years and I have never been still for twenty minutes in the rain."
"That one I keep on top of the stack," Nell said.
The second was from a man named Daniel in Sheffield. No coast, no dune line, no North Sea. He had hung his chime on a hook on the back-garden trellis. The first warm April breeze caught it on a Saturday morning while he was making coffee in the kitchen with the back door open. He wrote that he had stopped what he was doing and stood at the back door for the rest of the morning.
"He wrote me that the chime gave a Saturday morning in his back garden a sound he hadn't known he was missing. I had never been to Sheffield. I picture his back garden every time the wind comes up here."
The third was a folded card from a woman named Patricia in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Patricia had hung her chime above her front-garden bench and had never moved it. The card had one sentence on it, in blue ballpoint pen:
"I sit in the garden every evening now. I never used to."
Nell slid the three cards back into the drawer and pushed it closed.
"That last one I think about when I'm filing a tube," she said. "You spend thirty-four years walking the shoreline before dawn, and somebody in a garden in Aldeburgh reminds you why."
what's inside each one
Four hand-cut bronze tubes. One mother turtle on top. Five hatchlings below.
Five details set Nell's chimes apart from the painted-aluminium tube chimes most garden centres sell.
1. The Bronze Sustain
Four hand-cut bronze tubes with the long, warm sustain Nell spent six years getting right. Each strike rings — and keeps ringing — for almost a full minute. Aluminium jingles and dies. Bronze carries the coast.
2. The Resonance Dome
The ornamental bronze cap at the top isn't decoration — it's an acoustic reflector. It funnels the sound from the four tubes downward and outward instead of letting it scatter into the air. Without the dome, a chime drifts. With this one, it projects.
3. The Salt-Weathered Bronze
Bronze with an antique patina is naturally salt-air resistant. Six years on the Yorkshire coast have proven it. No rust, no corrosion. Built for gardens that see weather, not sideboards that see dust.
4. The Bempton Tuning
Every chime gets a final tuning check against a single fragment of bronze Nell keeps in the front pocket of her work apron. She picked it up off the workbench one August morning in 2019. It rings between E and F — the frequency she associates with the wind across the water at dawn, the sound she heard every morning of thirty-four years on the Yorkshire coast.
5. The Loggerhead Cons…

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