BRIDOL is the British Sundial Society's Register of Fixed and Mass Dials, which gives detail and photographs of about 8000 fixed sundials and 3000 mass dials in the UK.
Some of these are in private gardens, but the majority are publicly available.
The church lies in a valley which slopes down to the River Taw and it would be difficult to find a finer setting for a church which is said to be one of the most architecturally interesting in the county. As if that were not enough, it has on its porch what some would consider to be the finest dial in Devonshire. It was made by Jno Berry in 1757 and is a slate dial in a stone surround, of break-arch pattern with the motto, "Watch and pray Time steals away" across the arch. Below that a sun face at the gnomon root divides the date. On the corbel beneath the dial appears Berry’s signature. It shows VI - VI divided into halves and quarters, each half-hour marker being decorated by a fleur-de-lys. It has a decorative cipher for noon and uses IIII for 4pm. That is only the beginning since there is a set of declination lines marked with the signs of the Zodiac so that we may know the time of year as well as the time of day and also the length of daylight at that time. It has the names of 14 places across the world from Fort St George on the East coast of India to Port Royal in Jamaica, enabling us to compare their time of noon with our own local solar time. Yet another set of lines indicates the direction from which the sun is shining and still another set shows the boundaries of six of the twelve astrological houses, a feature surprising to find on a church sundial. The dial measures 650mmw x 850mmh.
