On the rear wall of the house, between the kitchen door and the patio doors to the living-room, there is a blank area of brickwork which just cries out to have something done with it. Over the years I have tried wall-mounted pots and tubs with climbers trained up trelliswork. All have failed miserably. Even daily watering hasn't saved the plants, the wall faces virtually due south and is very sheltered and so hot and dry. It is in fact an ideal spot for a wall-mounted sundial, but I have tried every garden centre for miles around and found just one, a miserable little brass thing which I didn't like at all. The internet was much more fruitful, but although I found a selection, the cheapest I could find was £50 and very small (I could have had one custom-built for £3,000!) And before you ask, no you can't just put a conventional sundial on a wall, the gnomon (the pointy bit) would be upside-down and the figures wrong way round!

Stage 1 :
I started out by measurung the positions of the lines for the hours the sundial's face : apparently there are calculations you can make, involving the angle of the gnomon, the exact direction the wall faces and the precise latitude and longitude the sundial is to be situated at, but I think it's much easier the way I did it : I made a cardboard model and hung it on the wall, and every hour, on the hour (when the sun was shining) I ran out with a pencil and marked the position of the gnomon's shadow! I decided to mark the times in BST as I don't sit out in the garden much during the GMT months anyway.

Stage 2 :
Designing the actual face of the sundial : the following five designs were what I came up with and after a few attempts I finally settled on the Owl design.

 

Stage 3 :
Making the face of the sundial : 'cold clay' handles much like ordinary modelling clay but has the advantage that it sets really hard and doesn't become brittle with time. I blended two packages of the clay and moulded them with my hands into a roughly ovel shape then using my fingertips, flattened it out on a board to the required shape and size and impressed the features and textures. Using the cardboard model I had made, I transferred the positions of the hour markings onto the clay and impressed them into it. Finally, I pierced four holes for mounting screws through the still-soft clay and then left the whole thing to dry thoroughly.

The gnomon (representing the owl's beak) did give me a little trouble, but the final version was made from sheet plastic and a chopstick (!) painted terracotta red using one of those little "tester" pots and glued into position, using the cardboard gnomon from the test version as a template to ensure that the angle from the vertical was correct.

Once hard, the whole thing was given several coats of outdoor-grade clear varnish, front and back, leaving each coat to dry before applying the next, and was finally mounted on the south-facing wall where it remains to this day. The paint on the gnomon has require retouching, but the clay remains hard and undamaged despite being out in all weathers.

My Owl sundial on a nice sunny day, with the shadow showing just after 3 p.m.

~ BACK TO PREVIOUS PAGE ~ BACK TO HOME PAGE ~ EMAIL ME ~