Seventeen tonnes of bronze, the largest casting this house has ever attempted and the reason the pit had to be dug twice. Magna took three days to pour by relay of crucibles and ten days to cool under her mound of loam, during which the third founder posted a watchman to keep boys from walking on the ground above her, because the ground was warm.
She is also the crookedest voice in the register, and the founders have never pretended otherwise. At her scale, every fault of the eighteenth-century mould is magnified: her tierce sits more than a third of a semitone wide, her hum droops audibly flat, and the two quarrel for the better part of a minute after each stroke. No lathe in 1788 could correct a bell of her mass, and no founder since has dared try — cutting seventeen tonnes to true would mean gambling the whole voice to fix a fraction of it.
So she rings as cast, on the great feasts and the deaths of monarchs, perhaps a dozen strokes a year. Those who have stood in the chamber describe the sound less as a note than as weather. The register describes it in four words: beneath her, the earth trembles.