Penlee House Gallery/Museum, Penzance

In 2002 this dial was erected as a memorial to Gladys Tranter, a teacher and producer of plays at the Minack Theatre. It is a puzzling structure and looks as though it is meant to be an analemmatic dial showing the hours 8am to 4pm. The usual form of analemmatic dial employs a human gnomon standing at the appropriate point on a N-S pathway marked with the months of the year. This dial has an immoveable slate gnomon bearing the inscription ’She enlightened our lives’. Is it possible that the gnomon tells the time accurately only on the date of Gladys Tranter’s death? Even if this is the case, the dial is wrongly delineated since the 8am to 4pm line is set along the major axis of the ellipse.