Saltcoats Solar Time

 It was 11.27am BST.

The lovely sundial in Saltcoats was at roughly 10.15GMT so actually about 15 minutes out.

I loved the phrase that my watch tells me "legal time".

Local time is set by when the sun is highest in the sky being 12 noon. You can tell by when the shadow on a vertical stick is shortest. Legal time has 12 noon fixed as being when the sun is highest in the sky in Greenwich. This fixing was necessary to make the time the same everywhere when railways appeared, needing fixed timetabling. It takes 24 hours for the Earth to rotate through 360 degrees so that's 15 degrees an hour. We were 4.5 degrees west so that's 18 minutes behind legal time, which is about right allowing for the width of the shadow.