The 2024 Sawyer Dialing Prize goes to Dennis Cowan, "for his decade-long project 'In the Footsteps of Thomas Ross', tracking and documenting Scotland's wealth of ancient sundials as originally recorded over a century earlier by Thomas Ross." In 2004 Dennis saw a magnificent obelisk with 76 distinct sundials in the garden of Drummond Castle, one of the dials recorded by Ross. From that point on, Dennis was determined to document and photograph as many of the sundials as he could find that appeared in Ross's work.
In the last of 40 BSS articles written by Cowan on the Scottish dials recorded by architect Thomas Ross, Dennis wrote "For around ten years now I have been walking with Thomas Ross, travelling all over Scotland, with a short detour into England, looking for the sundials that he catalogued mostly in Volume 5 of The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland way back in 1892. In all, he identified around three hundred sundials and I have followed in his footsteps looking at many of them."
Fred presented Dennis with an award certification, the traditional cash prize of $250 and a custom made Spectra Sundial by Jim Tallman of Artisan Industrials.
http://www.artisanindustrials.com/world-of-sundials/spectra-sundial-outremont-quebec-canada.html
NASS thanks the British Sundial Society for its permission and collaboration to collate the 40 articles by Dennis Cowan into the digital publication "In The Footsteps of Thomas Ross - Tracking the Ancient Sundials of Scotland", which also includes the 1892 section on Scottish Sundials by Thomas Ross from Vol. 5 of The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (pp. 357-514). Click on the following link to download this priceless compendium on Scottish sundials.
 Cowan_In_The_Footsteps_Of_Thomas_Ross_2024.pdf | [ ] | 166551 kB |