Summary
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 so we can only hypothesize.
Statistics are a simple way to prove the extraordinary nature of the dials in scotland:
Total
We are all 'standing on the shoulders of giants' and without the pioneering work of Thomas Ross (1890) and Andrew Somerville (1994) this website and interest would have been virtually impossible. 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.
This website is likely to always be under development and I am always interested in hearing from people about possible improvements, additions, links, assistance etc. It is also quite likely to become a bit of a web design museum piece. The world changes too quickly.