I took this photo on Friday, I visited a church in east Kent, walked around the main path leading to the porch on the southern side and there it was, on the quoin stones of the south east corner of the nave. At eye level, scratched into the quoin stone, with the hole in the centre where a timber peg would have been pushed.
This is a mass dial; when created in the early medieval period, the average parishioner could not read or write, so conveying to them the times when prayers would need to be recited throughout the day was a real challenge. Therefore it was an easy visual aid to tell the parish when the prayers or Divine officer as they were know would be taking place.
These mass dials seem to vary, which could be related to the knowledge of the incumbent and the geographic location of the church. This dial, is an early one, mechanical clocks began to come into use in the 14th & 15th Century and onwards percolated down into parch churches, some mass dials were still created in the transition of clocks, dials of this period and later seem to be a full circle with the markings on the lower half.
The early dials noted from the Saxon period allowed for the division of the day into three periods, it was the Normans who divided the day into 12 hours and their mass dials reflected this. The church where this photo was taken was built in the early Saxon period and was rebuilt and altered in the early medieval period. Many dials were lose in church restorations of the 19th Century where churches were virtually rebuilt, this did not happen to this church and this is confirmed by the dial covering two quoin stones with the line aligning perfectly.
Next time you visit an ancient church keep your eyes open for a mass dial, there are some 3,000 which have been recorded and therefore they are still only on a small proportion of the 15,000 churches in the UK, their original location was the south elevation in easy sight, but some have been recorded as being relocated during later work.
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