Greetings fellow dialists,
This is not really off topic, more off centre, perhaps. The church at
Dalton-le-Dale, County Durham, England has what until now has been
thought two dials. One is an important Anglo-Saxon dial of around 700
AD, mounted on a later wall. The other, the object of my question, is a
series of numbers on the inside north wall of the nave of this
thirteenth century church.
Mrs. Gatty describes them incorrectly: "There are some remains of a dial
on an interior wall of St. Andrew's Church at Dalton-le-Dale; only the
numerals I to VII are to be seen now, and these are raised in relief
upon the plaster, and are said to conceal an older set of figures. The
hours would be shown when the sun shone through the south window."
There is a story currently told that the sun shone on the easternmost
number on St. Andrew's saint's day, 30 November from a former hole in
the roof. Given the low angle of the noon sun on that day this is quite
impossible
The numerals on the north wall of the nave are in fact VII to XII, not I
to VII, arranged linearly from west to east and occupy most of the
length of the wall at a height of about a metre. They were viewed by
members of the British Sundial Society during their meeting in Durham a
few weeks ago and the general consensus was that the numbers could not
be any form of time measure. A proposal was that they had been placed
under successive Stations of the Cross pictures and that they had
survived where the pictures and the numbers I to VI on the south wall
had not.
My question is this: What is the history of Stations of the Cross in the
Church of England. Presumably some must be pre-Reformation but they
would generally have been extinguished by Cromwell's men and the puritan
movement. Could the numbers have survived, without pictures, from the
seventeenth century and a gradual story have grown up about their
representing a sort of sundial?
Speculation welcome.
Frank 55N 1W
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