IHBC’s COVID-19 signpost 51: Scotland’s ‘Monument Monitor’, and how your holiday snaps could help historic sites

Historic Environment Scotland is asking people under lockdown – and after – to ‘dust off that photo album and plug in that external hard drive as we tell you about Monument Monitor’!

image: HES website

HES writes:

Although travelling to visit your favourite heritage sites is currently not an option, you can still help with their ongoing conservation. How? Well, Monument Monitor wants to see how visiting patterns, climate change and long term trends have affected these sites. We need your pictures to help.

Where?

We are asking anyone who has visited Machrie Moor in ArranAchnabreck in Kilmartin Glen or Clava Cairns to send us any photos they have of their visit. There is no time limit on this, if you have any in the loft from your grandparents, send them in!

This is a part of the Monument Monitor project, a joint initiative between the Institute of Sustainable Heritage and Historic Environment Scotland. The project looks at how we can use visitor photographs to monitor remote heritage sites. Even whilst social distancing you can help advance real scientific research from home.

What can your photographs tell us?

Visitors’ photographs over the years can tell us a great deal about the sites we look after. We can track vegetation growth in castles, erosion of peat caps along walls of iron age forts and monitor ground erosion near our most popular sites.

At Achnabreck in particular we are measuring vegetation growth across the ancient rock art site. Your photos from across the years will help us better understand the vegetation growth and the flow of water across the around the stone carvings, which are nearly 6000 years old.

Read more….

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