No wind-up! Staff to change 600 clocks tomorrow night

AS the clocks go forward in the early hours of Sunday, a team of staff and volunteers at The Irish Museum of Time are busy preparing to take shifts in changing the time on over 600 clocks.

Clocks will go forward an hour from 1am tomorrow night, meaning there is an hour less in bed on Sunday morning.

The next time after this that the clocks will change is on Sunday, October 27 when the clocks will go back one hour.

But at the Greyfriars church in Waterford city, home to the Irish Museum of Time, there is no time to sleep in.

Turret clocks that once adorned church steeples, and a line of 10 grandfather clocks illustrating the evolution of Irish clock-making from the 17th to early 20th centuries, are among the more than 1,000 timepieces and related ephemera on display in the museum. Acting curator-manager of the Waterford Treasures Museums Rosemary Ryan said: ‘As you can imagine, changing the time on all of these historic pieces is a time-consuming process.

‘The process of changing the time on each clock is a slow and steady one. We only have two people working on changing the time on the pieces at any given moment, as some of the clocks have certain little quirks when you wind them, so it’s an exercise of patience.

‘Some of the clocks are eight-day clocks, so about 25 will already have been wound and changed,’ she said.

The collection was made possible by donations from two of the country’s best and longest-standing horologists, David Boles and Colman Curran, both from Dublin, who have given their collections of timepieces to the museum.