Lidar for free!

As of the beginning of this month all of the Environment Agency Lidar data for England has been released as open data. It can be accessed through a new portal. Some have complained of problems, and it can be rather slow loading the background mapping, but I've been able to get my hands on lots of interesting stuff already.

Roman temporary camps north and south of Hadrian's Wall just east of Aesica

The data is released under Open Government licence which allows commercial use, so it's all there to play with as you see fit. Sadly, in the process we have lost Wales which devolves elsewhere (though through some odd [and yet to be repeated] glitch I managed to download a chunk of the Lleyn peninsula just the other day, so the data seems to be there - hopefully someone will sign it off for release before too long).

Mapping and Archaeology

Much of my day job as Project Manager for (Archaeological Project Services) Trent and Peak Archaeology (as of Feb 2014) involves the, often pretty routine, preparation of costing and specifications, wrangling of staff and equipment and trying to keep fieldwork projects running smoothly (and to budget!). Luckily, I don't have to do that all of the time (or it might have stopped being interesting a long time ago). One of my other roles (and one that grabs my interest rather more) lies in survey, mapping, CAD and GIS work, taking that archaeological information and displaying it in informative and (I hope) interesting ways. Time and again I find myself working up maps and images for very limited circulation and thinking I should really put these together somewhere. So now I will. Some of this will be new some of it may be quite old. But hopefully it won't just languish on my hard drive in future.