Carnfunnock Country Park

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Carnfunnock Country Park has thirteen modern sundials within its walled 'Time Garden'. Strictly speaking not all of them are sundials, but all of them relate to time telling.

The five vertical blue aluminium plaques made by Brookbae and delineated by Christopher St.John H. Daniel (See Info. and Books page) trace the history of time-telling starting with the Ancient Babylonians who divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 equal parts taking no account of the difference in day length thus giving rise to hours of different length, shorter hours in winter - longer hours in summer.

another dial shows the direction of the sun and its bearing,

This dial indicates the number of daylight hours in the current day and the Sign of the Zodiac in which the sun is situated,

Our modern day is divided into 24 hours of equal length. There is a vertical Equal Hours sundial, longitude corrected to show Greenwich Mean Time when used in conjunction with the fifth plaque which shows the Equation of Time.

There is a vertical bronze dial in the form of a disc with a Jester's face breaking through from behind. His hands can be seen grasping the disc at both sides. He has a flute in his mouth which casts a shadow to indicate the time on the Arabic numerals around the bottom edge of the disc.

There is an unusual 'optical' dial invented by Gordon Benoy that uses a central cylinder of water to focus the sunlight, even weak or hazy sunlight, onto a white dial plate calibrated for summer time. This is an Equatorial Sundial, so called because its dial plate lies parallel to the equator. This means that the sun will only shine on the dial plate for half the year between the equinoxes viz. from 21 March until 21 September.

and a horizontal dial to show summer time, when our watches are set one hour ahead of Greenwich.

There is a replica of the Co. Down Nendrum dial,

and an analematic dial where the human becomes the shadow casting device,

two multi dials, one using the cut surface of the stone to cast the shadows

and the other using gnomons

and in the centre of the garden a magnificent Armilliary Sphere.

The 191 hectare Carnfunnock Country Park is on the A2 Antrim Coast Road 6 km north of Larne. British Sundial Society SR No 3288 thru 3300 Lat 54° 53'North   Long 5° 51' West Irish Grid   D  337960   406080