Digital Technology to Preserve Heritage Structures

*Steve Hold*

#### **Abstract**

Heritage masonry structures such as castles, ancient sea walls, breakwaters and lighthouses have existed for centuries but more than ever in this current era need to be preserved and quite often strengthened to be able to survive natural and manmade destructive forces. This chapter uses examples of digital technology to not only strengthen and preserve such structures but by advocating the use of the internet offers archive access to what these structures are, what has caused their deterioration and what has been done to strengthen them for future generations to see. By also using archive research into their construction in a combination with digital models of the structures the examples in this chapter show others how the use of LiDAR, drones and GPR have been able to secretly and sensitively strengthen and preserve these structures. The examples in this chapter range from a Neolithical tomb to castles and breakwaters dating from the middle ages and unique engineering examples from the UK's Victorian age of engineers. Now that these worked examples of preservation and strengthening have been stored and become available visually through the internet to those interested and working in this field by using such modern digital tools, they are now able to enter a new paradigm of Heritage preservation.

**Keywords:** Preserving, Digital, Record, Heritage, Monuments

#### **1. Introduction**

In the recent years, particularly since about 2010, I have been capturing and recording the significant projects that I have worked upon and been involved in either restoring, strengthening and preserving in the field of Heritage buildings and Heritage sea defence masonry structures. This usually involves repairing or strengthening these structures 'in place', often with invisible strengthening methods that minimise adding or altering the fabric of the Heritage structure as little as practically possible.

The forces at work attacking these masonry structures, particularly the sea and sometimes man-made development around the areas in which they sit, means that there has usually only been a transient focus on what was done to preserve them in the current era .. This quite often means that what was recorded for the long-term posterity is limited and minimal records being kept during the projects. The detailed information of how, why, and where the structure was repaired and strengthened is quite frequently not recorded sufficiently and the useful and critical data is often lost.
