Examples of heritage crime

In Scotland, heritage crime isn’t recorded separately to other types of criminal activity by the police. Theft is recorded as theft, whether it’s someone’s purse on the high street or a historic artwork from a gallery. This means we don’t have statistics on the amount of heritage crime in Scotland.

Our counterparts south of the border, Historic England, commissioned research into the scale of heritage crime in England. It revealed that the biggest single threat to historic assets is metal theft. The type of building most at risk are churches, mostly due to their lead roofs, a trend that is repeated in Scotland. If a roof is removed or damaged, it may not be possible to replace it and the wind and rain may get in - this may then cause significant damage that can never be put right.

But heritage crime doesn’t only take place on land. In 2016, two divers were each fined £18,000 for illegally taking artefacts from the wrecks of the scuttled German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, Orkney. 

Theft can extend to visitors taking stones from a building or cairn. The impact can be cumulative – where many people do the same thing, the result can be significant loss or damage.

Throughout time, visitors have felt the desire to leave personal markers by etching or spray painting names and symbols into some ancient wall or artefact. Once the act is complete, the historic fabric is altered. In the case of scratched graffiti, it will never be the same again. Sites affected include standing stones, cairns and castles.

It’s impossible to staff every site and most archaeological monuments have no alarm systems or surveillance.

We need your support to help protect Scotland’s sites for future generations and raise awareness of heritage crime.

Irreversible heritage crime includes the demolition of listed buildings without consent. Thankfully, this is also very rare, though arson can have the same effect as demolition.

Listed buildings – places of special architectural or historic interest – have a legal status that means, where possible, they should be protected from demolition. Change can be necessary for places to thrive and sometimes the future of a listed building is uncertain. But before demolition is considered, the reuse and adaptation of listed buildings should be always explored.

Sometimes buildings cannot be saved, but the memory and records of them can be. Illegal demolition prevents this opportunity to create a memory of place for future generations.

For example, when the planning system approves the demolition of a listed site, we’re given three months to undertake a Threatened Buildings Survey to capture information, photographs and data about the site. This full record of the site is saved in trove.scot, the digital home of the HES Archives.

Our role in the planning system

Demolition can also affect scheduled monuments, our nationally important archaeological sites and monuments. But it is also impossible to repair other types of damage to them. For example, quarries or borrow pits that are dug in the wrong place can remove burial cairns that have survived for thousands of years.

New tracks, agricultural improvements or forestry works can also dig away a range of features, such as prehistoric rock art or the foundations of roundhouses. Although these incidents are not common, they nevertheless happen too often.

It's important to raise awareness of scheduled monuments, and highlight that people can commit an offence if they:

• do certain works without consent

• destroy or damage a protected monument if they ought to have known it was protected and were reckless about whether it would be damaged.

We want to raise awareness of scheduled monuments and the legal protection they have, to save these irreplaceable assets and to help people avoid breaking the law. We provide maps showing the location of these sites on trove.scot. We also have guidance available for anyone who is planning to work on or near a monument:

Many people own and use metal detectors in Scotland. They’re often individuals, members of clubs, or participants in archaeological projects. Responsible metal detecting can play an important role in researching our past, where disturbance of sites is controlled and finds are recorded and reported on.

Responsible metal detecting has led to some incredible discoveries – but without the correct permissions, it may be a heritage crime.

Scheduled monuments – sites of national importance – are legally protected. Our permission is needed before metal detecting and certain types of geophysical survey can take place on those sites. We normally only give permission if the detecting is part of a research strategy with provision for the conservation and reporting of finds, designed to avoid harming the significance of a site.

Find out more about metal detecting in Scotland and stay on the right side of the law.

If you do make an archaeological find when out metal detecting, you must declare it to Treasure Trove.