CHRIS KOENIG looks at the some of the more interesting sundials and clocks dotted around Oxfordshire

The business of telling the time was a very haphazard affair until well into the 19th century. Then the introduction of trains, and the necessity for them to run according to a timetable, caused a certain amount of standardisation.

All this exercised the minds of Oxford University dons considerably. They warded off the railway from Oxford's city centre until comparatively late, worrying that trains would enable undergraduates to escape too easily to the flesh-pots of London and generally undermine the dons' authority.

And, of course, the cathedral, which is also the college chapel of Christ Church, still officially runs to a different time to the rest of the country — five minutes behind everyone else.

But even without any very accurate means of telling the time, the eternal questions of time and space had bothered minds for centuries, not only in the university but out and about in the countryside, too.

From about 1653, for instance, the academics at All Souls could tell the time accurately enough, provided it was a sunny day. That year Sir Christopher Wren was made a Fellow of the college and it was about then that he designed the great sundial there, bearing the ponderous motto: Pereunt et Imputantur, meaning (the hours) pass away and are set down to (our) charge, a quote, I am told, from Martial's Epigrammata.

It was originally placed in the First Quad but later moved to its present site in the North Quad. Wren said of it: "One may see to a minute what it is o'clock, the minutes being depicted on the sides of the rays."

A much earlier sundial, in the form of a column, stands in the quad of Corpus Christi. Built in 1580, it is officially called the Turnbull Dial, after its maker Charles Turnbull, but is more usually known as the Pelican, after the stone bird that surmounts it.

Until 1706 the sundial only worked in summer. That year it was dismantled and placed on a plinth to increase its height and enable it to catch a few rays, even in winter.

But perhaps the oddest manifestation of pre-railway thinking about time and space has nothing to do with the university at all. About half a mile from the village of Wroxton in North Oxfordshire, at the North Newington turn on the A422, is a remarkable signpost-cum-sundial made of Hornton stone and dating (though much restored) from 1686. Each of its four sides bears carvings of male and female hands (identified by rings on the fingers) pointing travellers on their way. It was skilfully restored in 1974 by local stonemason George Carter.

Witney's clock and sundial, on top of the Buttercross — until the 1950s the place where sheep were bought and sold — are successors of those made thanks to a 1683 bequest by William Blake of Cogges.

Also in Witney is the single handed 18th-century clock on Blanket Hall, similar to the one at Garsington church, where the hours are rung on a bell and the hand tells the quarter hours.

But back to Oxford and those dons preoccupied with the mysteries of time, space — and trains.

The Rev Spooner (1844-1930), warden of New College, when expelling an undergraduate, said: "You have hissed all of my mystery lectures. Now you must leave Oxford by the town drain."