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Sundial trails competition 2009
entry regulations and guidance

Buy a sundial from a leading maker
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 2010, and two prizes, of £250 and £100 are offered for the best entries submitted.

We have had 7 sundial trails submitted this year, and our judges have now been asked to start work on identifying the two winners. We hope they will finish their work in the firsst part of Maarch. The new trails are (in the order in which the sun shines on them!)

Many thanks to all these contributors who have worked hard to produce some very interesting new sundial trails


Would you like to submit an entry next year? YTou willl find that sundial trails are fun to do, and you can get some useful experience by following one of the 50 trails we have so far - all over the world. Click here for the entry regulations and guidance.

Entry requirements

A. Entries should be submitted to Sundials on the Internet by noon on 31 January 2010 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).

C. The text for your sundial trail The text for your sundial trail should, if possible, be in html within a table which can be dropped (by us) into our standard sundials.co.uk template. If you find it easier, you may submit is as a Microsoft Word file or in a text file, or in the body of an Email. The position of the images should be indicated, for example, by [Image 1 here], or the image iteself may be placed in a Microsoft Word file with {image 1} as a caption.

D. Irrespective of whether they appear in your Word file, images should be submitted separately in .jpg or .gif format. They should be not more than 350 pixels wide, and preferably under 100 kilobytes. All your images should be suitable named, preferably with an abbreviation of the name of the trail followed by 01, 02 etc.Image names should not have any speces in them. The images should be put in a .zip file if they are sent by Email.

F. By submitting an entry in the competition, you agree that your sundial trail may be posted on www.sundials.co.uk subject to suitable acknowledgement of your authorship and copyright of the text and pictures.

G. The prizes will be allocated by the judges in their absolute discretion. One or both of the prizes may be withheld if the entries do not attain a sufficient standard. The prizewinners will be notified as early as possible after the closing date, and their names posted on www.sundials.co.uk. No correspondence will be entered into.

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 competitiors

1. 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.

9. You will find it useful to read the judges comments on our competitions in 2001 and 2000

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