Dial of the Month

Please send your own submissions of your favourite sundials to the Registrar. This is your chance to show your favourite (public) dial (perhaps one near where you live, or one you have found on your travels) to other dialling enthusiasts around the world.

Thanks to John Lester for the following description:

Some would describe this dial on the church porch as Jno Berry’s masterpiece. It is certainly a fine dial though the slate has become badly cracked since it was engraved in 1762. It follows the usual pattern with winged heads in the top corners and the date displayed around the arch. Below this is a traditionally lugubrious motto, “Tempus fugit mors venit” (Time flies, Death comes) and underneath that a sun face surrounds the gnomon root. A further motto appears below which reads “Nos ut umbra” (We are like a shadow). The hours shown are VI to VI with a decorative cipher at noon. The half hour divisions each have a fleur-de-lys decoration and quarters are also shown.  The dial not only has 12 declination lines which show the length of daylight in Arabic numerals and, less precisely, the signs of the zodiac, but also set of vertical lines indicating the direction from which the sun is shining. As if that were not sufficient, Berry has provided lines which tell us the time of noon, relative to our own local time, at eleven places around the world! Of the more obscure ones, Fort St. George and Surat are on the East and West sides of India while Port Royal was the original name of Kingston, Jamaica. Finally, the maker has added his own name at the bottom of the plate in modestly small letters. Even Pevsner mentions this dial though he offers no praise whereas Mrs Gatty devotes generous space to it and gives details of Berry’s life.

Maud Heath was a pedlar woman who in 1474 left sufficient money to endow the causeway which crosses the Avon just before it reaches Chippenham in Wiltshire.  The best preserved section is a raised footpath supported by 64 brick arches, allowing the river to flow underneath in times of flood.  Half way along the causeway, at Kellaways, stands a pillar erected in 1698, and bearing this cube sundial.  The original Latin mottoes were translated by the Rev W L Bowles and inscribed on the lower section c 1828.  The Rev Bowles had a reputation for absent-mindedness.  At a school prize-giving he presented a Bible to one child, having written in it “With the author’s compliments”.

Two other dials grace the causeway.  Towards the eastern end, at East Tytherton, a very vandal-proof quincentenary memorial dial was built in heavy stone in 1974 (SRN 3089), and at Langley Burrell, at the western end, you will find a well preserved small vertical of 1719 on the church of St Peter’s (SRN 3085).

This unusual equatorial sundial was designed by BSS member Robert Scott Simon in 1988.  The time scale is mounted at the end of a long sloping support, and rotational adjustment is provided to twist the dial by means of an adjustment screw, according to the Equation of Time correction needed for 25 different date settings. Time marks on the Equator band show the hours using Arabic numerals from 8am to 9pm, with half hour divisions. An explanatory plaque is fitted to the concrete pedestal.