The Kennedy Monument

The Kennedy Monument in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews, is one of the most important funerary structures to survive from the Middle Ages in Scotland. Dating from the 1460s, it was built as a tomb for James Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews (died 1465), who founded St Salvator's in 1450. It was selected for recording by RCAHMS because its stonework is in a particularly fragile state. Although parts of its structure have been damaged or are missing, the tomb, at some 7.5m in height, is still highly impressive. Influenced by French sculpture of the period, its intricate array of multi-faceted arches, vaults and canopies represents a serious challenge for recording.

Semi-oblique photography with softer lighting was used as a recording technique to allow the intricacies of both the front face of the monument and its interior spaces to be illustrated with clarity. Detailed photography was carried out section-by-section, using directional lighting to bring out the full complexity of the sculptural forms.

As the chapel is used daily by students and staff of the University of St Andrews, scale drawing – which would have required months of on-site recording – was not a viable option. At a meeting with colleagues from English Heritage, photogrammetry was proposed as a possible alternative recording method. This is a remote sensing technique which allows extremely accurate plots to be created from a suite of stereo photographic images located using a precise framework of control points. The Metric Survey Unit of English Heritage, based in York, has the specialist skills and equipment necessary to undertake this work, and they generously agreed to take part in a joint exercise with RCAHMS staff.

RCAHMS surveyors established a very accurate set of control points by measuring precise three-dimensional coordinates for a number of temporary targets strategically placed on the monument. The monument was then photographed by the English Heritage photographer using a highly specialized metric camera and the resulting photographs were used to generate stereo images from which a very accurate line drawing was created.