Site visit to Ladykirk Church
Date of visit: Monday 21st October
We visited Ladykirk church, near Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, which was built in the early 1500s. The kirk is cruciform in plan, consisting of an aisle-less nave with a tower at the west end, north and south transepts, and a semi-hexagonal apse at the east end of the choir. Unlike Holyrood Abbey and Melrose Abbey which incorporate cross vaults, Ladykirk uses a more primitive type of vault; the pointed barrel vault. The main body of the church and the transepts is spanned by stone pointed barrel vaults with transverse ribs at intervals of approximately every 4 metres, springing from small corbels on the walls. As a consequence of the form of a barrel vault, there are no windows or clerestory openings in the upper structure, making the building dark.
The kirk is covered by a roof of stone flags, similar to the stone roof installed at Holyrood Abbey in 1758, which is widely considered to have caused the abbey's collapse ten years later. Although the vault we are modelling is a cross vault, it was useful to get a feel for the scale of this structure and view the overlapping stone slabs from which the roof is constructed. We also took a series of measurements of key dimensions within the kirk, whilst Dr. Theodossopoulos conducted several 3D laser scans of the intrados of the vault.
We visited Ladykirk church, near Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, which was built in the early 1500s. The kirk is cruciform in plan, consisting of an aisle-less nave with a tower at the west end, north and south transepts, and a semi-hexagonal apse at the east end of the choir. Unlike Holyrood Abbey and Melrose Abbey which incorporate cross vaults, Ladykirk uses a more primitive type of vault; the pointed barrel vault. The main body of the church and the transepts is spanned by stone pointed barrel vaults with transverse ribs at intervals of approximately every 4 metres, springing from small corbels on the walls. As a consequence of the form of a barrel vault, there are no windows or clerestory openings in the upper structure, making the building dark.
The kirk is covered by a roof of stone flags, similar to the stone roof installed at Holyrood Abbey in 1758, which is widely considered to have caused the abbey's collapse ten years later. Although the vault we are modelling is a cross vault, it was useful to get a feel for the scale of this structure and view the overlapping stone slabs from which the roof is constructed. We also took a series of measurements of key dimensions within the kirk, whilst Dr. Theodossopoulos conducted several 3D laser scans of the intrados of the vault.