March 16, 2018, by Erin Snyder

Digital Arts: Laser Scanning Reveals Hidden Histories

A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

Guest blog by Chris King

Concealed inside a key building in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, researchers from The University of Nottingham have used the latest scanning technology to reveal in 3D a hiding-hole used by 17^th-Century Catholic priests escaping religious persecution.

Coughton Court in Warwickshire sits at the heart of an important group of Catholic country houses, and it has a secret priest-hole hidden in a turret of the main gatehouse, concealed between the floor levels. Researchers first visited the house in 2015 to make a laser scan of the double-level priest hole with the aim of digitally reproducing its location in a computer model.

In 2016 the team returned, thanks to generous funding from The National Trust, to complete a scan of the entire mansion, inside and out, in situ in its grounds. On completion, the comprehensive 3D model aims to help experts visualise more clearly how the priest-hole has been hidden within the structure, and to allow visitors to explore this hidden space online even if they cannot physically access it.

Researchers: Dr Chris King (School of Humanities); Dr Sean Ince and Dr Lukasz Bonenberg (Nottingham Geospatial Institute, School of Engineering)

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