SX4061 : Sundial over entrance, Church of St Mary
taken 9 years ago, near to Botusfleming, Cornwall, England

The parish church is dedicated to St Mary and has a western tower and a fine arcade between the nave and the north aisle. The church was restored in 1872 by Henry Eliott; this restoration included new roofs, floors, pews and glazing. The font is of Polyphant stone, probably 14th century in date. In a field near the church is an obelisk in memory of William Martyn built in 1762.
In the church is a stone effigy of a knight in armour; he is thought to be Stephen le Fleming who was a medieval Crusader and perhaps left his name to the place.
Grade II* listed. Link![]()
Botusfleming is a village in southeast Cornwall. The village is about three miles north-west of Saltash. There is a public house (the Rising Sun), a market garden, parish church (St Mary) and a small colony of artists, but the village is mostly a dormitory area for Plymouth.
A sundial is a device that tells the time of day by the apparent position of the Sun in the sky. In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from its style onto a surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day. The style is the time-telling edge of the gnomon, often a thin rod or a sharp, straight edge. As the sun appears to move across the sky, the shadow-edge aligns with different hour-lines. Those sundials that directly measure the sun's hour-angle by the shadow of an edge must have that edge parallel to the axis of the Earth's rotation to tell the correct time throughout the year. The style's angle from the horizontal will thus equal the sundial's geographical latitude. It is common for inexpensive mass-produced decorative sundials to have incorrect hour angles, which cannot be adjusted to tell correct time.
