Visualising High Pasture Cave, Isle of Skye

High Pasture Cave is renowned for having yielded a spectacular wealth of evidence about the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation through a comprehensive programme of excavation and analysis. Situated in a dramatic location under the slopes of the Cuillin Mountains on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, this cave and its monumentalised environs were a focus for specific and special activities throughout the Iron Age - a venue for spectacular and extensive ceremonies featuring feasts, fire, crafts and the symbolic deposition of a plethora of artefacts and environmental materials, as well as human remains.

In 2008, AOC's survey team undertook laser scanning on behalf of the High Pasture Cave & Environs Project, scanning the entrance stairwell, the Bone Passage and the junction with the main streamway. These elements of the cave would have been very difficult to record through standard, measured hand-drawing, so laser scanning was selected as an efficient and effective way of creating a highly accurate record.

One of the more recent products of AOC’s survey was a digital reconstruction image (below) showing the terrain outside the cave combined with the laser scan, creating a representation of the entrance into the subterranean cave.