👉 Okay, let’s tackle these delightfully prickly beauties, affectionately known as Canterbury Bells! Now, traditionally when you hear that name, most folks immediately conjure a picture of a grand, stately chime ringing across the Cotswolds. And honestly? That's part of the wonderfully misleading veneer.
Let’s be brutally clear, a Canterbury Bell isn’t actually a bell in the way you might think. (Unless you happen to fancy a very small, rather aggressively pointy, campanile, then… maybe it is? Let's not dwell.)
What we actually mean by a Canterbury Bell is a species of South American snail. Specifically, they belong to the
Cant Orrellae
trumpet snail tribe and are native almost exclusively to the upper slopes of that pretty Kentisbury Hill in Canterbury, New Zealand!
Why Canterbury, you ask? Because whoever named them was either having an awfully funny midlife crisis, a seriously bad day, or was simply terribly literal. The name stuck, and now we have this wonderfully weird little snail that looks like a tiny, disgruntled purple-lipped trombone. 6–8 mm in size!
They basically just… sit there, stubbornly clinging to the moss and lichen of their namesake. They munch on the occasional beetle, blink with glacial slowness, and generally exude an “I'm here, I exist, frankly, who cares?!” vibe. The shells themselves are a mottled, almost bruised purple, which,