Greetings fellow dialists, A little while ago a discussion was published of a dial in Hawkshead, Cumbria, UK, having an odd longitude attribution, one not referring to its true longitude. An account and picture appears in the BSS Bulletin 19(iii), 2007. It did not take our sundialists of the present group long to establish the true meaning of the strange longitude and everybody went off satisfied at a job well done.
However, apart from its longitude inscription the dial has an odd appearance. It stands closely surrounded by a stone frame resembling a window frame, directly over the door of the old Hawkshead Grammar School, the school which William Wordsworth had earlier attended. The building, and hence the frame, declines eastwards from south but the dial is further canted eastward, entirely within the frame, to apparently read earlier hours; it is thus a morning dial. It was suggested at the time that the further cant was to allow the dial to read the time earlier than the frame and the building allowed, perhaps having something to do with the start of the school day. But I fancy this would not be possible. Regardless of any cant, the available hours of a wall dial are surely only those of the wall it stands on. And so this leads to a further puzzle, namely, why was the dial canted so oddly within its frame. Suggestions welcome. Frank, 55N 1W --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
