Story & photo: John Mellor
Local residents who regularly walk through Abbeyfield Park may well have noticed that the sundial has recently been put back on the front of Abbeyfield Park House.
This sundial was constructed by Steve Pool in 2001 with the aid of a grant obtained from the Peak Park Millennium Commission.
Steve told me:
“There are actually two sundials, one for winter and one for summer use. The present one is designed for British Summer Time (BST) but when the clocks go back at the end of October it will be changed to one that operates on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The original sundial was made of bronze and must have been stolen in the 1990s; there is a picture of it in a box of local Burngreave photos at the Burngreave Library.”
The construction of a sundial requires considerable technical expertise. Steve says:
“I had to buy a set of mathematical tables giving cotangents to calculate the correct angles required for accuracy. The sundial has a horizontal dial and needed corrections for the fact that it does not face due south. Sundials show ‘local apparent time’ which varies by plus/minus 10 minutes from clock time. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) only came in with the advent of the railways.Before that, early clocks were supplied with a table so that an adjustment could be made to local apparent time for the synchronisation of railway timetables throughout the country.”
If you check the time on the sundial with your watch as you walk past you will see that it’s pretty accurate – that’s provided the sun is shining, of course!
The original sundial was fitted in 1883 by Bernard Wake who owned Abbeyfield Park House at the time. He was also responsible for having the inscriptions engraved in the stonework above and below the sundial, presumably to give people something to think about as they walked past.
The one at the top reads
“My time is in Thy hands”
and the on underneath is
"Show me the light of Thy countenance”
(quotations from Psalms 31 and 4, respectively).