The
pinnacle of dialing in Scotland was the 17th and 18th centuries. The
period of the late Scottish renaissance and the flowering of the enlightenment.
For
the first time in hundreds of years Scotland was sufficiently stable
and prosperous for palaces, mansion houses and decorative castles to
be built. They took advantage of the atmosphere of displaying learning
in their decoration and in the process created an extraordinary range
of elaborate sundials.
The
dials seem to have been rarely created for accuracy of time keeping
instead seeming to be objects of high fashion and demonstrative of culture
and education. Unfortunately there are no contemporary sources explaining
their precise meaning and so we can only hypothesize.
As
so often others have gone before us and in this I am in the debt of
Thomas Ross (Scottish Sundials) and Andrew Somerville (The Ancient Sundials
of Scotland). The former was the originator of studies into Scottish
sundials with his pioneering work in the 1880s while the latter (one
hundred years later) took this on from cataloguing to a more questioning
analysis.