The British Sundial Society

Promoting the Art and Science of Gnomonics since 1989

BSS One Day Meeting – Newbury, 25 September 2021

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We are again meeting at Sutton Hall, Stockcross, Newbury RG20 8LN (directions below).

Exhibits – Talks – Bookstall

Beautiful country village setting. Plenty of free parking. Modernised village hall with ample space, tables and chairs for all your interesting displays (indoors and outside) of sundials, models, photos etc. Please include a card with your name on any displays.

Please bring something along:

  • Dials: finished, or in progress
  • Pictures
  • Paraphernalia

Speakers welcome – 10-minute talks / demos. Please e-mail David Pawley with suggestions for talks, ideally before mid-September 2019 if possible.

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New Monograph – The Portable Saxon Sundial at Canterbury Cathedral by John Davis

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The silver and gold Saxon sundial discovered at Canterbury Cathedral in 1938 is a unique but enigmatic device. Although widely featured in a superficial manner in many publications it has not been properly studied before: neither its materials and manufacture nor for its likely provenance have been discussed. John Davis’ new monograph describes an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) examination of its several component parts, leading to the hypothesis that it is closely linked to King Edgar’s reform of the English monetary system in A.D. 973.

BSS Monograph #14, The Portable Saxon Sundial at Canterbury Cathedral, can be found on our Publications page, together with other monographs and BSS publications.

BSS Bulletin archive available online

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The BSS Bulletin archive, previously published on CD, is now freely available on the website. At present issues from July 1989 (the first Bulletin) to December 2010 are provided as searchable PDFs. Members may be interested to see the original front covers from the first three editions since these went out of print quite quickly and were subsequently republished with the current cover design.

The archive page has two tabs: each issue is accessible via its thumbnail on the Volumes tab and the Articles tab has sortable columns for author, title and volume as well as a free text search for titles.

These 76 issues with nearly 1500 articles and more than 3500 pages of text represent an unparalleled body of knowledge about sundials which the BSS is pleased to make widely available.

BSS Virtual Conference – follow-up

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A number of people have requested to see the chat discussion from the recent virtual conference: it is now available as a PDF or text file.

The full responses to the SurveyMonkey survey are also available, apart from Q10 which contains contact details for the people who entered the draw for a free annual subscription to the BSS. Thanks to all those who left feedback and who entered the draw: the winner, drawn at random, was Martins Gills. We will be in touch with him to confirm the details.

Update #2: BSS Zoom Event – 17 April 2021

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We successfully held our first Virtual Conference via Zoom on the 17th April and were joined by about 150 participants from around the globe. Feedback about the event has been extremely positive and all the speakers – Roger Bailey, Woody Sullivan and Fred Sawyer, with the event introduced by Frank King – were very highly rated for their fascinating talks.

The full video of the session, lasting a little over 90 minutes, is available here:

Although the vast majority of participants were able to enjoy the session, unfortunately a small number of people did not receive the joining instructions. We hope that the video above makes up for that and we have taken those issues, as well as the large number of comments and suggestions, fully on board. We will provide information about how we plan to proceed in due course but there is clearly an appetite for more events like this!

Four Dials by Tim Chalk

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Tim Chalk submitted details of four dials to the 2020 BSS Sundial Design And Restoration Awards
well before the end of the competition but due to an oversight they were not added to the list of entries or the web site at the time. Apologies to Tim for the omission and we encourage visitors to look at them. They have also been added to the full list of entries below.
The four dials are:


Read on for more details of each of these dials.

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