Sundial and marmalade at Dalemain

We went to Dalemain House near Penrith for the wonderful marmalade festival and found this lovely old sundial. It had markings on for the minutes as well as hours.

 The best bit was that it tells you the latitude (note the old-fashioned spelling).

 Which meant that I had a chance to check the thing that I discovered just before Christmas... that the angle of the slanted gnomon to the horizontal should be the same as the degrees of latitude north of the equator. I wasn't carrying a protractor so I tried to photograph it as square on as possible. On my screen, it measures as 56 degrees which suggests in real life it will be the same as latitude. I'm still thinking about what happens on the equator where the latitude is 0 degrees.

 Mrs B's first ever marmalade scored 15/20 which was a triumph. I posted a few weeks ago about the thermometer used in its production.