Aerial Survey

Aerial photography is a very effective way of surveying the landscape, identifying previously unknown sites and recording buildings, towns, cities and ancient monuments.

In an average year RCAHMS aerial survey teams fly for one hundred hours in a single engine Cessna 172 aircraft and take 4000–5000 photographs. This collection now has over 110,000 photographs of all aspects of Scotland’s landscape.

Every summer, RCAHMS look for and photograph buried sites that show as differential crop growth (cropmarks), which would otherwise be invisible to the archaeologist. Thousands of these buried sites have been found in lowland areas and they are being placed on maps to assist conservation, planning and research.