The Monument Monitor project allows Historic Environment Scotland (HES) to monitor the conservation status of our Properties in Care (PiC), including some of our most remote historic sites, using citizen participation.
Members of the public who visit our participating sites are asked to take a photograph of the site and to send this to us. These photographs will enable us to identify and monitor potential degradation or other problems at these sites, whether caused by erosion, the growth of moss, lichen or other plants, vandalism or anything else.
The following PiC's currently form part of the Monument Monitor project:
- Aberdour Castle
- Achnabreck Rock Art
- Antonine Wall - Rough Castle
- Baluachraig Rock Art
- Carn Ban Long Cairn
- Castle Semple Colligiate Church
- Clava Cairns
- Doune Castle
- Drumtroddan Cup and Ring Marked Rocks
- Drumtroddan Standing Stones
- Kelso Abbey
- Kilwinning Abbey
- Lincluden Collegiate Church
- Machrie Moor Standing Stones
- Maiden Stone
- Mavisbank Policies
- Ness of Burgi
- Ravenscraig Castle
- Ring of Brodgar
- St Blane's Church
- St Bridgets Kirk
- St Mary's Church, Grandtully
- Tarves Tomb
- Tealing Soutterain (Earth House)
Participating in the Monument Monitor project
Members of the public are encouraged to provide photographs and other images (together with any related information) of any of the participating sites and submit these to our dedicated email address mm@hes.scot.
Any photos that you contribute to the Monument Monitor project must have been taken by you. Any photo taken by a child must be submitted by their parent or guardian. If you are submitting a photo on behalf of a child, you confirm that you are a parent or guardian of the child.
We would prefer that you don’t submit any photos which include people’s faces or anything else that can identify a person (including yourself). However, if you do, we will delete the affected photos.
Submitted photos should not contain any malicious, obscene, offensive, hateful, inflammatory or defamatory language or images (the exception to this is if you are sending us a photograph showing evidence of vandalism or other heritage crime at a participating site).
Please also see our general content standards in our Terms and Conditions.
In taking photos, at no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe the law.
The contribution of a photograph is intended to be anonymous. On receipt of your email, we will anonymise any personal data connected with a photograph submitted to the Monument Monitor project, so that we can use the photograph free of any personal data.
Please see our privacy notice for further information about how we will use your personal data.
If you change your mind about contributing your photograph(s) to the Monument Monitor project, please contact us on mm@hes.scot within 60 days of your submission email, using the subject “Data Removal”. Please include the date of your submission, as well as what site it was taken at and a description of the image. We will then delete the relevant photograph and send you a confirmation email.
Other than an automatic confirmation by email, we will not contact you in connection with a submitted photograph unless your photograph shows that a heritage crime such as vandalism may have been committed at the site or that there may have been serious degradation of the site. In those exceptional circumstances, we may require further information from you about what you may have observed during your visit at the affected site, and we may share personal data with the Police to allow them to investigate a crime.
Copyright licence
By submitting photos to Monument Monitor, you agree to grant Historic Environment Scotland (HES) a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use the photos in our research and conservation work, interpretation work, work relating to heritage crime, to add the photos to our archives, to make the photos available to third parties for academic or non-commercial purposes (including research and teaching), and also to use the photos in relation to all of our other statutory or delegated functions. We may also publish the photos in connection with this work, in publications such as news articles, academic journals, social media and blogs. As the photos are submitted anonymously (we will not retain your email submitting a photo), we will not be able to credit you as the photographer in subsequent publications, so by submitting them you are waiving your moral right to be identified as the author.
However, you will still own the copyright to everything you contribute to HES.
The “Monument Monitor” software used by HES in order to monitor the conservation status of the participating sites is available on an open-source basis under the terms of an MIT Licence. Any use of such “Monument Monitor” software shall be subject to such MIT Licence and shall be on an “as is” basis, without any warranty of any kind. In any event, HES shall not be responsible or liable for any claim, damages or other liability arising from, or in connection with, the “Monument Monitor” software or the use of such software.
Use of previously-submitted images
A huge thank you to everyone who submitted photos to the original Monument Monitor project, which was a collaborative research project between Historic Environment Scotland and the Institute of Sustainable Heritage at University College London. The project was founded by Rosie Brigham, who was a PhD student at UCL at the time. The original project has now ended, and Rosie has now passed her PhD - congratulations Rosie!
HES is now continuing with Monument Monitor as part of our ongoing research and conservation work. All photos submitted to the original project have been transferred to HES. They will be stored in the HES archive for HES internal use, and we will use them in future in relation to all of our statutory and delegated functions, particularly research and conservation work, and preventing and investigating heritage crime. We will not publish any of these photos.
If you do not wish your photos to be used in this way, please email us at mm@hes.scot with the subject “Data Removal”. Please include the date and method of your submission (i.e. email, WhatsApp or social media), as well as what site it was taken at and a description of the image. We will then delete all relevant information and send you a confirmation email.