Great Barn

Today, when visitors explore Herstmonceux Castle and its grounds, their experience is absent one of the estates largest and most significant medieval structures: the great barn. The barn was over 150 feet long and sat perched on the edge of a peninsula overlooking the Pevensey Levels, just outside the western boundary of Herstmonceux Castle’s medieval deer park. A virtual reconstruction of late medieval Herstmonceux would not be complete without this great barn. The following describes how we reconstructed the barn digitally to be used in augmented and virtual reality education applications, using methods from virtual archaeology and documentary archaeology, and historic building information modelling (HBIM).

The project drew source material from archival records, historical maps, geospatial data, and architectural treatise and co-eval constructions. The only detailed written account of the great barn comes from the July 25, 1850 meeting of the Sussex Archaeological Society. Perhaps fittingly for the Environments of Change project, a summer storm forced the meeting inside the nearby barn. It is only because of this storm that the Reverend Edmond Venables noted the details of the barn’s interior, “it would be an unpardonable omission… if I were to close this paper without some mention of the noble old barn beneath whose spacious roof the Society found shelter from the pitiless storm. The size and antiquity of this barn mark it out as an object of great interest… and no one of the company who had dined in it is likely ever to forget [its] wonderful beauty.” Historic maps, such as the Ordnance Survey 25 inch series (1873), provided details about the barn’s special context and exterior. Several photographs from the early twentieth century provided the final evidence needed to begin the reconstruction.

The barn model served as a test case for implementing Historic Building Information Modelling processes (HBIM). Building information models combine accurate 3D models with the power of an underlying database of structural, architectural, building cost, build-time, materials, maintenance scheduling, and energy use data. Whereas Heritage BIM seeks to leverage BIM as a tool for preservation and maintenance, our method for Historic BIM aims to leverage BIM tools to store research and metadata, and generate tools for future research and analysis such as historic environmental impact.

HBIM also improves our ability to be transparent and to visualize better the accuracy of our models’ component parts. These uncertainty values are foundational to virtual archaeological methods. Combining HBIM methodologies with emerging AR and VR applications allows our researchers and audiences to engage with research through interactive and immersive experiences, and to connect research data as they relate to the individual components of our growing library of 3D assets.