Greetings fellow dialists, Recently the Anglo-Saxon dial at Dalton-le-Dale, County Durham, England, has been professionally cleaned. The black carbon deposits were removed using a micro-airbrasive unit and aluminium oxide powder. The cracks in the dial were filled with masonry cement and the surrounding stonework pointed.
The people undertaking this work had previously worked on the famous dial at Escomb which is of approximately the same age as the Dalton dial i.e. thirteen hundred years, and is much better known. The Escomb dial was treated by them with a water repellent. It appears that the Dalton dial was not. I am not sure why this was not done, whether from a shortage of cash or for some other reason. The Dalton dial looks much better than it did but I wonder whether it is now more vulnerable to acid rain than it was. Could the cleaner (who I am not in contact with) now know some reason not to use a water repellent? I would be grateful for any comments. By the way the Dalton dial, like the Escomb dial, was thought to have been marked in tides (BSS Bulletin 1999, 11, pp.100-103). But the cleaning has revealed that in fact it was marked out in (unequal) hours. It has traces of animal figures carved in relief in the upper corners and was altogether a very fine piece of ornamental work. No wonder it was retained by later generations and after five hundred years built into a thirteenth century wall. Frank 55N 1W -- Frank Evans
