Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

Description

Historic Environment Scotland is the lead public body set up to investigate, care for and promote Scotland’s historic environment. It ensures the historic environment is cared for, valued and enhanced, both now and for future generations. Historic Environment Scotland is responsible for more than 300 properties of national importance. Buildings and monuments in the HES' care include Edinburgh Castle, Skara Brae, Fort George and numerous smaller sites, which together draw more than 5 million visitors per year. It is also responsible for internationally significant collections including more than 5 million drawings, photographs, negatives and manuscripts, along with 20 million aerial images of locations across the world.

Within Historic Environment Scotland's Engine Shed building conservation centre in Stirling, the Digital Documentation and Innovation team applies 3D digital technologies, including photogrammetry and laser scanning, to document heritage sites and objects, generating data used to inform conservation decisions, heritage management, learning and interpretation. The team runs training and community outreach to build digital-heritage capacity across the sector and undertakes research into emerging digital documentation methods, including through initiatives such as the Scottish Ten (3D modelling of ten international heritage sites), the Rae Project (3D modelling of Scottish objects and historic places) and the Monument Monitor citizen-science conservation-monitoring project.

Historic Environment Scotland has also worked with the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University on the Historic Digital Survey project, a long-running research partnership applying computer vision and machine learning to three-dimensional laser-scan and photogrammetry data of historic masonry in order to segment survey data and to detect and classify visible defects automatically, with outputs designed to feed into building information modelling. The partnership has produced peer-reviewed work from the mid-2010s through to 2025, including a technical paper on digital documentation, computer vision and machine learning for masonry surveying and maintenance that Historic Environment Scotland published itself in 2022.

Historic Environment Scotland holds Independent Research Organisation status from UK Research and Innovation and is a registered Scottish charity. Its technology and innovation work has brought machine learning and computer vision to the care of old buildings: a pair of linked projects trained a machine learning model on laser-scanned and photogrammetric three-dimensional data to find and categorise defects in stone walls automatically or semi-automatically, as an aid to building surveyors, and a further study used artificial intelligence to assess the condition of slate roofs on older buildings from drone and photogrammetric surveys.

It also curates the National Record of the Historic Environment, a national dataset of Scotland's historic places spanning archaeology, architecture, industry and the maritime past, which it publishes through online services while adding new entries and upgrading existing ones, with digital mapping a particular priority.

Offers funding

Yes, this infrastructure provides funding in the following categories:

Founding year

2015

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