As part of a project to digitally document over 300 Scottish heritage sites and their collections, a model of the neolithic village at Skara Brae on Orkney (Scotland) lets people explore Europe's most complete late stone-age settlement from a web browser.
     Partly exposed by a storm in 1850 and slowly revealed by decades of careful excavations, the 5,000 year-old site comprises ten rooms linked by passageways. The digital tour includes access to House 7, the best-preserved house at Skara Brae, not normally accessible to the public. Virtual visitors can explore Skara Brae through time from its discovery just over 170 years ago to coastal erosion from rising sea levels and extreme weather events.  
     Spatial data from ultra-fast high-resolution laser scanning combined with hundreds of overlapping images of the site were used to create the model. Since 2010, Skara Brae and the surrounding bay have been laser scanned every two years to monitor coastal change and inform management and maintenance of the site.

Edited from The Herald, Engineering & Technology (1 December 2021)