Hermitage

REP: Tom Beels tom@beelsandco.com DISTRIBUTOR: Faith Hervey

Photo: Jan Pescott

The residents of Hermitage would like to thank Keith Warren-Price for all his hard work on the multitude of village news, messages, articles and photographs that have been published here in the WVM. Great job Keith!

I have now taken over the role of Hermitage rep for the magazine, so please let me have your news – tom@ beelsandco.com

Tom Beels

Macmillan coffee morning

Regretfully it was not possible to hold a coffee morning to raise money for charity during the Summer, but Hermitage Village Hall sent a cheque for £250 to Macmillan Cancer Support.

Hedgehog alert!

There have been lots of hedgehog sightings in Hermitage recently, which is excellent. It is important for their wellbeing that we play our part in helping them to thrive. Here are some tips that may interest nature lovers.

• Leave areas of the garden ‘wild’, with piles of leaf litter and logs. These are an attractive nest as well as a home for the invertebrates (slugs, beetles) that hedgehogs like to eat. • Try to leave gaps in your boundary fencing if you can, they can travel a long way! • Making an artificial home can be as simple as placing a piece of board against a wall.

• Food and fresh water will encourage hedgehogs to return. Leave out foods like tinned dog or cat food (not fish-based) and crushed dog or cat biscuits. Specialist hedgehog food is also recommended and can be bought from wildlife food suppliers. • Never feed hedgehogs milk as it can cause diarrhoea; instead, provide plain, fresh water in a shallow bowl. • Cover drains and holes and place bricks at the side of ponds to give hedgehogs an easy route out. • Check for hedgehogs before using strimmers or mowers, particularly under hedges where animals may rest. Check compost heaps for nesting hogs before forking over. • Build bonfires as close to time of lighting as possible and check them thoroughly before lighting.

A scratch dial is a primitive – little use at night! But they medieval clock cut into the were doomed by the advent of stone of a church, usually clocks and a settled method on the south porch or a of recording time beyond nearby buttress. Typically, individual villages, and by the there is a hole large enough needs of a better educated to insert a wooden peg as population. By 1600, scratch a ‘style’ to cast the sun’s Yetminster dials had been outcompeted. shadow. From this centre The most complete of the Dating individual dials point, crudely scratched two dials more accurately than ‘early’, radiating lines mark the hours, with ‘transitional’ or ‘late’ is hard. None noon at the bottom. The earliest dials – appear in contemporary records. Over ‘mass dials’ – are often basic but were a the centuries many have eroded or have simple way to remind passers-by of the been damaged or defaced. Some were times of the daily Masses. relocated during restoration, a few of

These fixed, vertical dials preceded these upside any established time system, let alone down! We are is clocks, and took no account of seasons fortunate to have or other variables. In our terms they some excellent were hopelessly inaccurate, besides examples of having the obvious sundial problems these intriguing with cloudy weather and dusk. Bit by bit, medieval relics dial designs became more sophisticated. clearly visible on Thornford Radials were graduated to record time several churches Unusual dial on the window ledge east of the porch (two more accurately as the sun rose and in our Benefice, windows have these). The declined. Complete semicircles and including a rare vertical stone edge of the added decoration became increasingly window type in window acts as the gnomon to cast a shadow. popular. Some were set inside a full Thornford. On circle, some had dot markers, some even some churches – Yetminster and Bradford had both. Later ones added numerals. A Abbas, for example – there is more than few ambitious ones show a full 24 hours one dial. It is still possible to find an unrecorded one. All these dials date back 400 years and each one adds to the rich history of Bradford Abbas Hermitage Holwell our villages, our Two adjacent dials Single dial set low down on the Two dials on the churches and their high up on the nave wall east of the porch right side of the medieval past.buttress to the left of porch, the lower the porch one very eroded Keith Salvesen