Greetings, fellow dialists, also fellow diallists, Re sundials inside buildings, the village of Dalton-le-Dale lies six miles south of Sunderland, England. The Durham volume of The King's England (Hodder and Stoughton, 1953, reissued King's England Press 1990, no ISBN) contains the following words (p.46) about the parish church:
The most remarkable feature in the church is a row of raised numerals set about five feet apart on the north wall, to record the hours from seven in the morning to one in the afternoon. A ray of sunshine once passed through a slit in the roof above the middle window in the south wall, to mark the time on this extraordinary sundial. Mrs. Gatty (third edition p53) says: The hours would be shown when the sun shone through the south window, The above accounts refer to the numbers on the internal north wall of the nave. There is currently no sign of a light slit and there is no sign of hour lines on the wall, only the raised stone numerals. What sort of time did they tell? They are approximately equally spaced but require further examination. Did they only measure the tedium of the sermon while the sun was shining outside? But however they acted, they were clearly an internal sundial. The numerals have been dated to probably the eighteenth century although Mrs. Gatty suggests that they replaced earlier numbers. Frank -- Frank Evans
