EHG5783 - Historic building recording - Fairburn Tower, Muir of Ord

A comprehensive historic building recording exercise was carried out by Addyman Archaeology in 2017-18 for The Landmark Trust at Fairburn Tower, located on the Fairburn Estate, about 3.5km to the north-west of Muir of Ord. It followed on from an archaeological assessment and architectural analysis of the structure and its site undertaken by Addyman Archaeology in March 2017 (see EHG5782). The detailed recording exercise, which included the tower and the ancillary lying range on its west side, was conducted for a number of objectives and in relation to the proposed repair and rehabilitation of the tower by The Landmark Trust. The first aim of these works was to generate a set of dimensionally accurate drawings of the tower that could be used both for architectural purposes and upon which to build a more systematic record and analysis of the building in its present state, in advance of conservation and repair works and in order to better understand the nature, planning and details of the structure and to more properly decipher its evolutionary history. Such information is intended to inform the conservation decision-making process during the stage of developing detailed proposals for the tower. Survey of the tower involved a combination of digital and hand recording techniques. In summary UAV-captured imagery, modelled photography, etc. were employed to produce first a point-cloud image of the tower, to which was then meshed digital photographic imagery in RAW format to generate a high-resolution 3-dimensional model of the tower with photographic resolution. From this model were generated 2-dimensional orthographic projections of walls and cut-throughs for sections and plans. These were then digitised by hand to generate drawings at a scale of 1:20 in CAD and CorelDraw. The resulting drawing set was then checked for accuracy on site (at this stage as far as safe access would permit) and augmented by hand measurement. <1>