Skip to main content

The sundial at Alloa, Scotland is December’s ‘Sundial of the Month’. Border SundialsTwo-faced dials projecting on corbels are characteristically Scottish. The finest examples being probably those at Heriot’s Hospital, Edinburgh, where there are eleven of them. On the front wall of a house in Kirkgate. Alloa, Clackmannanshire, is the picturesque example illustrated, the work of a master mason named Tobias Baak or Bachup, whose initials, together with those of his wife, are carved on the stone beneath the date.

The A listed house is located at 25 Kirkgate (Star House). So just take a walk, look up and you will see the sundial on the front wall of the house.

Whilst you’re visiting Alloa some of its other famous landmark is the,15th century Alloa Tower (National Trust for Scotland), the surviving part of the ancestral medieval residence of the Erskine family, the Earls of Mar. It is one of the largest and earliest of Scottish tower houses.