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Sundial trails competition 2010 |
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This competition for new sundial trails is promoted
jointly by Internetworks Ltd, the webmasters of www.sundials.co.uk and
the British Sundial Society. The closing date is 31st January 2011, and
two prizes, of £250 and £100 are offered for the best entries
submitted.
Click here for a full list of all our sundial trails worldwide
Entry requirementsA. Entries should be submitted to Sundials on the Internet by noon on 21 December 2008 by post on a disk or CD ROM to POBox292, Epsom, KT17 4LQ, England, or by Email to competition@sundials.co.uk. Receipt of your entry will be acknowledged.B. Entries must be complete in themselves (ie without requiring
a page to be called from any other website). H. Entries may be in any language, preferably in the language of the country where the trail is located. Entries in languages other than English should have an English translation. Both will be posted on www.sundials.co.uk Guidance for competitiors1. The main purpose of writing a sundial trail is to help others who come to the area concerned to find interesting sundials to see.2. So it is most important to give really clear directions of where to start the trail, and how to get from one sundial to the next. 3. The second most important thing is to make the sundial trail interesting, so that it will encourage people who do not know much about sundials to follow the trail. 3. Sundials must not be included in trails if they are not visible from a public highway. 4. Sundials must not be included in trails if they are liable to be vandalised or stolen. This applies particularly to historic horizontal sundials. Advisory points 5. There are no formal requirements about the number of sundials on a trail, but it is best not to have too few or too many. Normally, between 4 and 12 is a good number. Depending on mode of travel and distance, these can usually be covered within a day. But some places, such as Tasmania, do not have as many as 4 dials, but it is still worth having a sundial trail for it, particularly since one of the dials is very unusual. If there are more than 12 dials on a trail, it is usually best to pick the best, and to refer very briefly to the others (eg. there is also a badly weathered vertical dial nearby on the church porch at......) 6. It is desirable to include some geographical co-ordinates if possible. If latitude and longitude are given, they should be given to the nearest second to be really useful. In Great Britain, a 6-figure National Grid reference serves as well, or an alternative is to find the postcode of a neighbouring building, and to put in a link to a national mapping website such as www.streetmap.co.uk or www.multimap.com. Similar possibilities exist in many other countries. 7. References to other pages should be made by explicit text links (i.e. "You can find further details of other dials in this area at http://www.otherpage.com" (with a hyperlink to the website concerned)(but such webpages can not form part of your entry - see B. above) 8. Overall maps of the whole route can be helpful if they are clear. It is best to use one of the national mapping sites for this is possible; otherwise, a diagrammatic map is recommended. Contestantr may find usefdul these notes written by the judges in a previous competition The judges were impressed with the quality of all the entries in our competition for the year 2000; this did not make the judging easy! We based our judgements on how useful we felt the trails would be to people planning an itinerary in that locality, and in particular: why are the dials interesting? how clear are the directions? how confident will I be that I can find all the dials? how long will it take We did not take into account the number of dials, since a trail with 3 interesting dials in a locality which has no more may be quite as interesting as a trail with many more dials. And we did not take into account the number of illustrations, since good, clear, interesting trails can be produced with them. Based on these criteria our judges unanimously considered the Guernsey sundial trail to be the winner. One of our judges wrote "A clear winner is the Guernsey trail. It gives a good overview, the total distance to be travelled, and practical advice for methods of transport and the time to be allocated. The locations for the dials are specified in no less than three 'notations' - a local map, the Guernsey grid, and lat/long to a precision that allows for a portable GPS receiver. In addition, the road directions are clear and unambiguous. 17 dials and most illustrated." The other sundial trails were also rated very highly by the judges. The enthusiasm of the Finistere trail was infectious, and we enjoyed the insight into the sundials of Malta. The Cotswold trail would clearly make an interesting day out, and the Hampshire trail was particularly easy to find one's way around. So all of these were highly commended. 9. You will find it useful to read the judges comments on our competitions in 2001 and 2000
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