North Ayrshire Heritage Centre, Saltcoats

The dial is high on the east-declining south wall, beneath the pediment of what was originally the parish church of Ardrossan (this part of Saltcoats being in Ardrossan parish at the time). The stone dial plate, and the plaque below, are canted west to produce a direct south-facing dial. The plaque is now illegible, but gave an account of the church’s history in Latin. The thin gnomon (about 6mm wide) is an aluminium strip with a simple bar support, and is slightly bent. The dial shows Greenwich local time rather than Saltcoats sun time. An outer ring of incised upright black-painted Arabic hour numerals is for summer time (8am to 7pm) and an inner ring of smaller Arabic numerals is for winter time (7am to 6pm). Incised lines join the corresponding GMT and BST numerals but do not extend to the gnomon root. There are no minute subdivisions. This dial is a 20th-century replacement for another dial that was already described as “obliterated” in 1876, though a photograph in a 1926 book shows that a gnomon was still present then. The building itself (Parish Hall in 1926, and before that the parish church of Ardrossan) was built in 1773, but it replaced another, on the same spot, that was built in 1744 but severely damaged by storms. The plaque once detailed the sorry history of the succession of parish churches of Ardrossan (of which this is the fourth!). Perhaps the original sundial came from the 1744 church? Ref: Cunninghame, Topographised by Timothy Pont, with Continuations by the late James Dobie of Crummock. Glasgow: John Tweed (1876) - mentions the former sundial and describes the plaque below it. Ref: C Northeast, ‘Saltcoats, Sundials, Storms’ in BSS Bulletin 28(iii) Sept 2016 pp 29-31