The earliest building Smith & Garratt has worked on to date is Coldingham Priory, established in 635AD. The Priory Church has been substantially damaged and re-built several times through the centuries and its elevations range in date and stone type. In all the mayhem some of the stones got laid the wrong way – what we call ‘face-bedded’. Sandstone laid on its bed is quite resilient, but when face-bedded it is weaker and prone to spalling. Exacerbated by pointing with cement-based mortars since WW2, the decay is now chronic, with much weathering and detachment.
The Church of Scotland asked us to produce a programme of stone repairs, hacking-out and repointing. It had to be produced on a shoestring, so we decided to create a 3D model using photogrammetry, and to plot the resulting images of elevations to scale – with individual defects highlighted. This involved taking numerous photographs of the building from different distances to get the required level of detail. The photographs were stitched together using Agisoft software to create a 3D model. We were then able to produce flat elevations of the building, used to identify individual replacement stones to be indented or replaced. This method enabled us to produce scale images and a precise schedule of 1,578 individual repairs to be tendered to stonemasons … for a pre-tender cost of only 95 pence per repair. At Smith & Garratt we like an innovative answer to a practical problem!
Image Gallery
Related News
Masonary Works at Coldingham Priory
More Case Studies
Smith & Garratt have acknowledged expertise with heritage property, regularly working on listed buildings and Scheduled Monuments. See some of our previous work.
Measured Surveys
Surveys of Non-Residential Buildings
