Evidence pack · England
Heritage Terrain Figures
The three bare-earth visualisations a heritage consultant illustrates with — multi-directional hillshade, local relief model and sky-view factor — captioned with every parameter and credited to their sources.
£49
One-off. Delivered by email within the hour. If it cannot be produced — a site the national survey has never flown — you are refunded automatically.
See a real sample — Old Sarum (PDF)
Three figures, and why all three
Historic England’s guidance uses these together because each is blind to something the others catch. You get all three of the same ground, at the same scale, from one survey.
- Multi-directional hillshade. Reads like a photograph, so a planning officer recognises it immediately. Lit from four directions rather than one, because a single sun leaves a blind direction — a bank running parallel to the light casts no shadow and vanishes entirely.
- Local relief model.Subtracts the landscape and keeps the archaeology. A 20 cm bank on a 40 m hillside is invisible until the hillside is removed; afterwards, banks read positive and ditches and hollow-ways negative.
- Sky-view factor. Illumination-independent, so a linear feature reads equally whichever way it runs — the direct answer to what a hillshade still cannot show. Concavities dark, convexities light.
Made to be put in a document
- Every parameter is on the figure. Azimuths, sun altitude, vertical exaggeration, kernel radius, direction count, search radius — burned into the image, not just the caption. A hillshade at ×2 exaggeration makes ground look twice as pronounced as it is, and a reader who cannot see that stated is being misled.
- Survey vintage and accuracy on every figure.The year the ground under your site was actually flown, and the composite’s stated accuracy — so a figure forwarded on its own still says what made it.
- Designations named and credited. Scheduled monuments, conservation areas, registered parks and gardens, battlefields and listed building outlines within the search radius, each with its source attributed on the sheet.
- Bare earth only. No surface model, so hedges, sheds and parked cars are absent by design — present-day clutter has no place in a figure about buried remains.
What it is not
These are figures, not findings. Nothing in this pack says what a feature is — and that is the point, not a shortcoming. An earthwork on a relief model may be archaeological, agricultural, geological or entirely modern, and separating those takes the historic environment record, documentary research and usually fieldwork. That is the assessment your consultant writes; this is the illustration set it starts from.
Remote-sensed ground is also not surveyed ground: the national composite is quoted at ±15 cm RMSE, and that is a property of the composite rather than a measurement of your field. And a designation search is the national record — absence of a designation is not absence of archaeology. Undesignated remains are precisely what these figures are good at showing.
Coverage
England only — the survey is the Environment Agency’s and it stops at the border. About 1% of England has never been flown at 1 m; on that ground there are no figures to draw, and the order refunds rather than delivering something thinner.
Ordered against a site boundary or a dropped pin, which we snap to its registered land parcel. Buying a pack grants no subscription and changes nothing about your account.