Beta Help us improve: share your feedback on our new website.

Search for a Protected Historic Place

Locate and discover Protected Historic Places in Scotland, including listed buildings, scheduled monuments, gardens and battlefields.

Start your search

Use trove.scot to locate and discover Protected Historic Places in Scotland, including listed buildings, scheduled monuments gardens and battlefields. It is the portal for the National Record of the Historic Environment, Protected Historic Places and our archives.

Go to trove.scot
The facade of a historic Scottish tenement building. It has uniform rows of seven large windows on each storey. A snow-covered road leading to a castle. Train going over the Forth Bridge as seen from South Queensferry Archaeological Remains of a Roman fort along the Antonine Wall Aerial view overlooking Ardclach Bell Tower surrounded by the woods View of green cliffs An evening sky with wispy clouds over the chimneypots of a row of Edinburgh tenement buildings. Remains of a wooden boat or shipwreck exposed on a muddy tidal shore, with shallow water pools reflecting the sky and distant shoreline in the background.

Search for Protected Historic Places on a map

See if a place or building is protected and to find out the extent of that protection. Our up-to-date map shows all national level designations, world heritage sites and conservation areas, with a text search and changeable layers.

Search the map

Search for designation decisions

For more information on designation decisions relating to Protected Historic Places, search the Historic Environment Portal.

Go to the portal

Many different types of historic buildings, monuments, sites and landscapes in Scotland are legally protected:

  • Listed buildings are of special architectural or historic interest. A listed building could be a grand example of civic architecture, or a modest domestic building which tells us how the people of Scotland used to live.

  • Scheduled monuments tell the story of thousands of years of history and prehistory, They range from ancient archaeological sites, with traces of the past above and below ground, to the defences constructed to defend Scotland in the Second World War.

  • The Inventory gardens and designed landscapes contains nationally significant planned green spaces, such as country estates, botanic gardens and even cemeteries. 

  • The Inventory of historic battlefields records and protects battle sites of national importance, including locations of fighting in the Wars of Independence and the Jacobite Risings.

  • Not all protected places are on dry land - historic marine protected areas (HMPAs) are underwater sites, such as shipwrecks or submerged settlements

You can follow the links above to search for a Protected Historic Place. You might need to know if a place is listed or scheduled for planning purposes, or you might be conducting research into a place or the people who once lived there. You could simply be curious about an old building on your street.

Read more about heritage protection and management in Scotland

Types of Protected Historic Places

Listed buildings

Listed buildings are of special architectural or historic interest. Find out about what listed buildings are, and how they are managed.

What is a scheduled monument?

Scheduled monuments cover 8,000 years of Scottish history, including iconic castles and archaeological remains.

Gardens and designed landscapes

Gardens and designed landscapes include the grounds of important houses, public parks, botanic gardens, golf courses and cemeteries.

Historic battlefields

The Inventory of Historic Battlefields records the location of significant battles fought on Scottish soil.

Historic Marine Protected Areas

Not all protected places are on dry land. The sites of shipwrecks and important underwater archaeology are also recorded and protected.

World Heritage Sites

These places are chosen for their global significance. They are important to all of humanity and require special protection and management.