Armillary sundial

This lovely thing stands in the middle of the one-time formal garden in Benmore Gardens, right on the spot where there used to be a small pond and fountain, the spot where I used to worry that each in turn of my small children might topple in and drown in the single hazard in an otherwise carefree environment. It is an armillary sundial, erected in memory of a former regius keeper of the Royal Botanical Garden and Queen's Botanist in Scotland, and although there was no sun while we were looking at it, we learned how to read it: by looking for the strongest shadow cast on the inside of the equatorial ring by one of the other rings. There the hours are marked according to BST; the ragged outer semi-circle depicts the Milky Way.

I wonder if the idea was that there would be even less chance of sun in winter...