In 2022, the City of Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh World Heritage(EWH), as a part of the Making Lasting Impressions Project, commissioned AOC Archaeology to create a 3D record of carved wall monuments from the Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The 3D recording at Greyfriars will aim to create a benchmark for the conservation monitoring of gravestones, and allow the extraction of new information from the remaining carvings.

EWH and Friends of Greyfriars Kirkyard (FoGK) selected seven monuments for 3D recording. The selection criteria included: the quality of carvings, architectural significance, their current condition, and the potential to extract new information from the 3D data.

To get the best results, AOC partnered with Leica Geosystems on this project. The aim was to combine the measurable record from a laser scanner, with the fine detail and color fidelity that came from photogrammetry.

The high-resolution data will be analysed by EWH and FoGK. Simplified 3D models were uploaded to the gallery below.