Cookie Policy

Cookie Policy

Find out what cookies are and how they are used on the Historic Environment Scotland website and our subdomains.

Edit your cookie preferences


This policy refers to cookies used on our Historic Environment Scotland (HES) domain www.historicenvironment.scot/ and subdomains www.blog.historicenvironment.scot/ and portal.historicenvironment.scot/.

Like many websites, the HES corporate domain and subdomains (the Service) use small files called cookies to help provide the best possible online experience for you.

Below, we explain what cookies are, what they do, how we use them, and how you can view or change your cookie preferences.

Who are we?

The HES website and subdomains are managed by Historic Environment Scotland, the lead public body established to investigate, care for and promote Scotland’s historic environment. We’re a non-departmental public body (NDPB) with charitable status.

We are committed to protecting your personal data and your privacy. Find out more about how we handle personal data in our privacy notice.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of text sent by your web browser on a website you visit. A cookie file is stored in your web browser and allows the Service or a third-party to recognise you.

Cookies can be either "persistent" or "session" based.

  • Persistent cookies continue to exist after you finish your website visit. They are eventually deleted, often after 6 months or longer. They are used to help the Service recognise when you return to the site; these cookies will remember key information about you, such as your site preferences.
  • Session cookies are deleted automatically soon after you finish your website visit, usually within 30 minutes. They are used to help the Service remember the status of your current visit, for example, a session ID might be stored to ensure you remain logged in.

You can remove cookies from your device at any time, and your device will automatically delete expired cookies.

First-party cookies entail a small text file that is stored on your computer when you visit a specific domain (website) and which cannot be shared with others. These cookies are set directly by the Service and only the Service can read them.

Cookies that do not originate from the Service are called ‘Third Party’ cookies. Such cookies are set by other digital services and are accessible by those services only. For example, if a webpage contains an embedded YouTube video, YouTube will set its own cookies to enable the video to work properly.

Some cookies are set by services for advertising purposes. For example, an advertising platform may set a cookie that recognises the online journey a user has taken across different websites. The advertising partner may set or read the cookies on other websites/services and link the users’ activity on this Service. Third-party cookies are not set by the Service itself.

How we use cookies

We categorise cookies based on how they are used; this section will help you make broad choices about which cookies you set.

Essential cookies

These cookies let you use all the different yet essential parts of the Service. Without them, the Service cannot be provided.  Therefore, they are sometimes called “strictly necessary” cookies.

For example, we use essential cookies to:

  • remember your preferences (for example, whether you have given your consent for cookies to be set),
  • remember security settings that affect access to certain content, for example, whether you are logged in or for enabling consistent access to our web servers,
  • enable certain essential services you need, such as a shopping cart.

Functional cookies

These cookies are used to provide functionality. For example, we use functional cookies to:

  • enable embedded imagery and zoom functions,
  • remember that you have visited the website before so that messages for new visitors are not repeated to you,
  • remember certain preferences such as language or text size.

Performance cookies

These cookies help us ensure the website is working properly and they highlight when we need to fix issues or improve experiences.

While we do not collect data directly about each user’s age, gender, or interests, we use Google Signals to receive anonymised data that groups and summarises information about the users who visit our Services. This includes the categorisation of users’ ages, genders, and interests, which provides more context to our performance data.

Any performance cookies we use only collects anonymised data to protect your identity, so we cannot identify any individuals from this data. We do not collect any data on sex, political or religious beliefs, nationality, or postcodes through cookies.

You can manage what data Google stores about you, and whether it can collect or share that data at myadcenter.google.com/controls

Third-Party Personalised ad cookies

From time to time we may use advertising services to help reach users on our sites with offers and content. Furthermore, we offer some content on the website embedded from third-party platforms such as YouTube, Soundcloud and others. Where we embed content, we cannot control the cookies that are set by such embedded content, and thus we treat the categorisation of these for cookie consent purposes as though they will set marketing cookies.

Where we use personalised ad cookies, it is to understand your interests and show you relevant adverts based on your browsing habits.

We work with third-party advertising networks to display adverts (ads) for the products and services we offer. The personalised ad cookies we collect for the Service are outlined below under ‘The cookies we set’ and within the cookie banner. You can choose to accept or reject these cookies by indicating your preference at the bottom of this page or within the banner.

These advertising networks may also be able to track your browsing across different websites. Giving or declining your consent for personalised ads does not change the online advertising you will see in general. It will only determine whether you will view the personalised ads our advertising networks present to you following your use of this Service.

The marketing and remarketing cookie services we use are managed by third parties. Find below the privacy policies for the third-party cookie providers we use for the HES domain and subdomains:

The third-party embedded content providers may set their own marketing cookies from other advertising services, and we cannot control or monitor what cookies they set. Where you view content from these services you accept that they may set these cookies. You can adjust your consent preferences for such third-party content at their own cookie policy functions. You can decline consent for marketing cookies on our services and our websites will continue to work for you without any embedded third-party content.

The cookies we set

Essential cookies

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironments.scot, blog.historicenvironment.scot and portal.historicenvironment.scot.

Load balancer

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

ARRAffinity, ARRAffinitySameSite

A unique identifier.

Used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session.

This expires at the end of your session.

Fonts.net bot management

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

__cf_bm

A random unique number or string of letters and numbers to identify your browser

Used by third party fonts provider for anti-bot security (via Cloudflare)

After 30 minutes

 

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironments.scot and blog.historicenvironment.scot only.

Microsoft Application Insights

Microsoft’s privacy policy 

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

ai_session, ai_user

A random unique number or string of letters and numbers to identify your browser

We use Microsoft Application Insights software, which collects statistical usage and telemetry information for apps built on the Azure cloud platform. This is a unique anonymous session identifier cookie.

The longest lasting cookie expires after 1 year, the other expires on the same day.

ASP.NET

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

ASP.NET_SessionId

 

Session ID

 

Used to identify the users' session on the server. The session is an area on the server used to store session state in between HTTP requests.

End of session.

Consent preference cookie

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

.CookiePreferences

 

A string for each preference set

Used to store information about a visitor's cookie preference settings

After 1 year

 

The following cookies can be found on Portal.historicenvironment.scot only

Oracle

Oracle Privacy Policy

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

ORA_WWV_APP_1505

 

 

Session IDs

 

This cookie is to store the user's usage history.

End of Session

 

Performance cookies

Google Analytics is an example of a first party cookie used for performance. Other organisations can’t access your data or view cookies used by our website, and we do not sell your data to any third parties. We also do not allow Google to share our analytics data.

Google’s privacy policy 

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironments.scot, blog.historicenvironment.scot and portal.historicenvironment.scot.

Google Analytics

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

_ga

Browser ID

Collects information about how you use this website

After 2 years

_gid

User ID

Used to distinguish users

After 24 hours



The following cookies can be found on historicenvironments.scot and blog.historicenvironment.scot only.

Google Analytics

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

_ga_LFVMXMFPCX

Session

Used to persist session state

After 2 years

 

The following cookies can be found on Portal.historicenvironment.scot only.

Google Analytics

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

_ga_JPK1NXP86B

 

 

Session ID

This cookie is used to persist session state which means remembering data about the user.

After 2 years

_gat_UA-5021193-17

A numeric value

The cookie is used to throttle request rate.

After 1 minute

Functional cookies

These cookies are used to provide functionality.

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironment.scot and blog.historicenvironment.scot.

ThingLink

ThingLink Privacy Policy

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

AWSALBAPP-0,

AWSALBAPP-1,

AWSALBAPP-2,

AWSALBAPP-3

 

Session ID

 

This cookie stores user's cookie preferences to avoid repeated consent prompts.

End of session.

Third-party cookies

These cookies are set to allow us and our partners to improve how we advertise to you. Declining consent to advertising cookies does not mean you will not see advertising, only that the advertising may be less relevant to you.

Google Advertising, and Google Marketing Platform

Cookies set by Google’s Marketing Platform will vary depending on the types of advertising you encounter. Not all of the cookies listed here might be set, even if you consent to marketing cookies.

How Google uses cookies for personalisation and advertising

 

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironment.scot only.

Google

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

 

_gcl_dc

 

Unique identifier for the ad click; Timestamp; Conversion data.

This cookie is associated with Google’s advertising and measurement products, such as Google Ads and Analytics. This cookie is used to store ad click information, which helps to track and measure conversions.

90 days

  DSID

User ID

This cookie is used by Google to identify a logged-in user on non-Google websites. It ensures that the user’s ad personalisation settings are respected, and it helps to manage and deliver personalised ads based on the user’s preferences.

14 days

Test_cookie

Unique identifiers

These cookies are used by DoubleClick to check if your browser supports cookies.

After browser is closed

_gcl_au

 

Unique identifiers

These cookies provide ad delivery or retargeting, specifically user actions on a website after viewing or clicking on an advert.

After 90 days

Meta/Facebook

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

 

_fbp

 

Unique identifier; Timestamp; Browser and device details.

This cookie is used by Facebook/Meta to deliver a series of ad products such as real-time bidding from third-parties. The cookie tracks user interactions and visits across websites where the Facebook Pixel is installed.

Up to 90 days

_fbc

Click ID and Timestamp

This cookie is used by Facebook to track clicks on ads and to link them to a specific website visit.

Up to 2 years

The following cookies can be found on historicenvironment.scot and blog.historicenvironment.scot.

Google

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE

 

Browsing behaviour

 

Advertising and personalised YouTube recommendations based on past views and searches

After 6 months of last use

 

YSC

 

User ID

 

Ensures that requests within a browsing session are made by the user, and not by other sites. These cookies prevent malicious sites from acting on behalf of a user without that user’s knowledge.

End of session

 

test_cookie

Unique identifiers

Google set a number of cookies on any page that includes a YouTube video. While we have no control over the cookies set by Google, they appear to include a mixture of pieces of information to measure the number and behaviour of YouTube users, including information that links your visits to our website with your Google account if you are signed in to one. Information about your use of our website, including your IP address, may be transmitted to Google and stored on servers in the United States. This cookie does not identify you personally unless you are logged into Google, in which case it is linked to your Google account.

Up to 365 days

_gcl_au

User ID

This cookie is used to store and track conversions from advertising shown on a website

Up to 89 days

As we use Google Signals, there are some related third-party cookies that may be set, depending on if you have consented to be tracked by Google.

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

IDE

User ID

Links your usage of this website to your advertising profile at Google

After 390 days

CONSENT

User ID and consent record

Stores whether or not you have given consent to Google advertising to track you – this should prevent you being tracked by Google if you have not consented.

After 400 days

NID

User preference

Used to store your advertising preferences from Google

After 180 days

Vimeo

Vimeo Privacy Policy

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

vuid

 

Browsing behaviour

 

This cookie is to store the user's usage history

After 399 Days

 

 

The following cookies can be found on blog.historicenvironment.scot only.

Instagram

Instagram Privacy Notice

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

ig_did

Browser ID

 

Provides Instagram with information on how our website is used.

Up to 365 days

 


Sketchfab

Sketchfab Privacy Notice

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

OptanonConsent

Cookie preference and consent.

This cookie stores a user's state regarding their cookie choices.

Up to 365 days

aws-waf-token

Session

This cookie is used to identify and separate malicious clients (bots) from legitimate sessions.

Up to 3 days

Soundcloud

Soundcloud Privacy Notice

Name

Data stored

Purpose

Expires

OptanonConsent

Cookie preference and consent

This cookie stores a user’s state regarding their cookie choices.

Up to 365 days

__qca

Browser and HTTP request

This cookie is set by Quantcast, who present targeted advertising.

Up to 13 months

sc_session

Unique session ID

This cookie is a critical component in maintaining user sessions within a web application.

Up to 6 days

ajs_anonymous_id

Anonymous ID

This cookie is used to store data about the user’s last visit to the web application.

Up to 365 days

datadome

Unique user and session ID

This cookie is used to identify and separate malicious clients (bots) from legitimate sessions.

Up to 365 days

eupubconsent-v2

Cookie preference and consent

This cookie is used to store data for remarketing purposes.

Up to 365 days

rubicon_last_sync

User browser ID

This cookie is used to sync cookie identifiers between different advertising systems and ensures users’ data is consistent across different platforms.

Up to 5 hours

Manage your cookie settings

On the HES domain and subdomains, we only use Performance, Functional, and Third-Party personalised Ad cookies after you have given your consent.

You can do this by selecting your preferences in the cookie banner or below. If you don’t give your permission, we will only collect basic, essential cookies.

You can also control your cookies in your web browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to manage and delete them within your browser, please use the following links:

To quickly manage third party cookies generated by advertisers, visit Your Online Choices.

We aren’t responsible for the information or the setting of cookies on these external websites.

 

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