Friday 18th October 2019
We were very grateful today for Toby Pillatt (DEBS project)
joining us as he brought along a total station borrowed from the University of
York. 
It took some time to set it up but once we got going we were, with his
help and guidance, able to plot in the precise locations of all the gravestones
on the south and west sides. At times there were interesting problems such as
trees which broke the line of sight between the total station and the prism,
but with all hands brought in to hold the branches back we were able to get all
the readings we needed.
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photo by Sue Stearn
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Sometimes the total station refused to take readings due
to “wind turbulence” which we suspect was sometimes due to us giggling too
much! So we hold our breath and tried again.
Having tried before to take GPS readings without any
success due to the tree cover, it was a relief that the total station appeared
to work well. Even when other gravestones initially broke the line of sight to
one we wanted to record, we were able to use prisms of different heights to
find the appropriate position to take a reading.
Our method was to always plot in the left side of an
upright gravestone before the right side (ie. as you are facing the
inscription). With box tombs and ledgers (recumbent stones) we always started
with the top left corner and worked clockwise to plot in the other 3 corners. Where
we had a surrounding feature (such as railings of kerbstones), or a secondary
memorial within the same grave plot, these were plotted in separately, in the
hope it will be clear on the final plan how they relate to the main memorial. Each
gravestone was of course given its own code reference (generated by the total
station) which we can later cross-reference to the grave-ID.
While 3 of us were learning how to use the total station,
Alan and Tony caught up with some RTI photography which needed re-doing – the lighting
conditions were much better than they have been on some days, in particular because there was no dappled sunshine on some of the memorials under the trees.
On the north side of the churchyard the church sidesman had arranged for extensive clearance of the old vegetation which was beginning to die back for the autumn – a huge amount of nettles, weeds and brambles have now disappeared, revealing more gravestones, which gave the photographers the opportunity to record them after they had been hidden all though the summer.
Our thanks to Toby – hopefully he will soon be back to help
us finish plotting in the remainder of the churchyard.
Jane Lunnon
