Useful Information & Contacts

Navigating trove.scot, the HES Website

When the new website has been fully studied, a navigation guidance page will be produced.

Accessing LiDAR Imagery on the National Library of Scotland Website

There is near Scotland-wide LiDAR coverage available on the NLS website, and this can be used in conjunction with online maps. There are other routes which offer higher resolution, but the NLS version is usable for many purposes.

Here are some guidelines to access this imagery:

Google NLS.

Homepage: find and click onto Digital Gallery.

Under Categories, find and click onto Maps and Mapping.

Under Maps find and click onto Map Images.

Under Map Images find and click onto Geo-referenced Maps.

You will then find yourself on a map of N and W Europe, with the UK at the centre.

Get rid of the help box.

Click onto the small, narrow banner to the right of the Search box at the top.

Choose as a background the LiDAR DTM 50cm-1m Eng,Scot and Wales.

The whole map should now go white except the UK.

At the bottom left hand corner, the Choose an historic map overlay box, and under 2. select a map. The OS Six Inch 1888-1915 is suggested, but many others will suffice. You will see a change in the UK and Ireland map.

Now zoom in and pan to an area of the map you want to look at.

At the bottom of the overlay box at the lower left hand corner you will see a slider to Change transparency of map overlay. Slide the button to the left and you will see the map disappear and the coloured LiDAR imagery emerging. You can pan the view around, but be advised that neighbouring areas will be slow to load and focus. Sometimes the screen will go white, at which point you may need to use the backspace arrows at the top left of the browser to refresh the image.

Remember that modern walls and buildings have mostly been filtered out, but base traces can usually be detected. You may use a screenshot to save an image of an area of interest, though be advised that this function produces higher resolution images in Apple Mac systems. The resulting .png image can be loaded into Word or Pages, where you can use tools to draw or type over the image.

Using the Dumfries and Galloway Council Website to view the Regional Archaeologist’s Interactive Map of Designations and Site Records

Google dumgal.gov.uk

Scroll down the homepage until you find Planning and Building. Click onto this.

Scroll down the next page until you find Planning Permission. Click onto this.

Scroll down that page until you find Planning Constraints. Click onto this.

Scroll down until you find the Archaeological Zones section. Click onto the blue “Check our Historic Environment Record”.

Scroll down in this section until you find the interactive map link under Sites in Dumfries and Galloway.

Use the zoom and pan commands to find areas of interest, and then use tools and info tabs to find more information. The panel below the map is scrollable, to find details of sites where available.

The orange dots indicate sites where there is HER record material. By clicking onto them, the relevant records become available in the box below. Red colouration indicates that the site or area is scheduled. Purple colouration indicates areas of archaeological interest. Pale blue areas are Archaeologically Sensitive Areas or ASAs. If you double click onto the legend symbol below the map, it enables more menu items on the map and a bigger map area to view. It can be useful to zoom in until the field boundaries are visible, helpful for navigation on the ground.

Print, screenshot or export commands are available, or you can use the screenshot facility on your machine.