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.
You would really only expect to find a sundial of such beauty and complexity in the gardens or quad of some Oxbridge college, yet here it is in the Plague Village of Eyam. It ranks with the very best sundials in this country.
It tells the time, of course, and gives much astronomical information as well, including the declination of the sun throughout the year, that is the sun’s position above or below the equator, here marked by the months and the tropics. At the top of the dial is a semicircle with the names of several 18th century cities around the world, such as Mexico, Mecca and Quebec. The shadow will tell the time in Eyam when it is noon in those places. The Tropic of Capricorn, at mid winter, the Tropic of Cancer at mid summer, and the time of the Equinox days are shown. All that from just one shadow.
The names of the two churchwardens, the latitude of Eyam, and the date 1775 appear at the top.
The dial was commissiond by the incumbant, Rev. Canon Thomas Seward and carved by William Shore, a local stonemason. The social connections of the Rev Seward, who held the living for 51 years and was a canon of Lichfield, and his patron the Duke of Devonshire, suggests strongly that the designer of this dial was the eminent scientist and clockmaker John Whitehurst FRS of Derby.
A motto, ’Ut Umbra - Sic Vita’ ’As a Shadow - So Life’ appears on the two supporting corbels, and the motto ’Induce Animum Sapientem’ translates as
’Encourage an Enquiring Mind’, which is exactly what you need when viewing this sundial.
There are other things to see - within a few yards there is a good Saxon cross, and in the burial ground, find the grave of the cricketer.
