Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Vale of Aldermere ·
The Report on the Slow Noon
Equinox readings show noon arriving a fixed minute late along one street of Aldermere Vale, and the sundials are excluded from the finding on the list's own instruction.
- filed: "with the equinox check"
- reference: "AV/NC/05"
1. This report records the equinox check of solar noon as received at eleven stated points of Aldermere Vale, conducted by the parish survey office under standing instruction, and the one finding among them that cannot be closed.
2. The method is old and plain. At each stated point a weighted staff is set, its shadow marked at short intervals through the noon window, and the instant of shortest shadow is taken as the local noon and compared with the almanac reckoning for the valley's position. The points run from the mill at the valley mouth to the chapel at its head, a distance of three miles, and are numbered in the order of the walk.
3. Points one through eight answered within tolerance. The shadow turned at Ilsley Bridge four seconds late, at the market cross nine seconds early, and so on through the fields, each point giving the small disagreement that any walk gives. These are entered in the schedule and require no remark.
4. Point nine stands at the head of Cordery Row, a street of twenty-two houses, brick, built in one campaign, facing a little west of south. At point nine the instant of shortest shadow came one full minute after the almanac noon. Not fifty-nine seconds. Not sixty-six. One minute, as scheduled, in the same manner that Thorne End keeps its clocks.
5. The check was repeated at the equinox following. Point nine again answered one minute late. Points eight and ten, which stand at either end of Cordery Row, answered true. The finding belongs to the street and to nothing else in the valley.
6. The survey office then consulted the sundials on the houses of the row, of which four survive in the brickwork, painted or scribed, of the oldest date in the street. A sundial is the readiest instrument for the finding, since it registers only the sun and can lie no more than the mason lied. At three of the four, the gnomon's noon shadow fell at the almanac minute, true, and the fourth was effaced past reading.
7. By every rule of the office these dials are evidence of the first rank, and they contradicted the staff readings plain. The office reported the contradiction upward, as it is bound to do, and received in return an instruction signed by the Cantor's registry and entered here verbatim: the sundials are excluded from the finding, deliberately, in all present and future schedules; the finding stands as the staff gives it; no comparandum is sought and none is to be constructed.
8. The office holds no opinion on an instruction of that standing. It is recorded here that the exclusion was asked for once, by the junior surveyor, Mr Cyril Deddington, on the grounds that a finding which sets aside its own best witness is no finding at all; and that his objection is minuted; and that his transfer to the coast office followed within the month, at his own application, which nobody at the office has ever had the face to doubt aloud.
9. What the office will say, having no instruction against it, is this. The row is quiet street, its houses let mostly to persons who work the valley iron, and it has kept its own habit of the day for as long as the lease books reach. The midday meal on Cordery Row is served at the almanac hour. The men go back to the yard at the almanac hour plus their minute, with their food inside them. Nothing in the leases says why.
10. There is one entry left over, and it is entered because the schedule has a blank to fill. On the afternoon the staff reading was taken for the second time, the householder at number eleven came out to watch the marking of the shadow, and when it turned she said to the surveyor, not unkindly, that the street had always got its minute from somewhere, and that he should ask himself what it costs to deliver a minute to twenty-two houses twice a day, every day, without anyone once coming to the door.