HES Switched Off Canmore Before Trove Was Ready

Historic Environment Scotland switched off Canmore, Scran and ScotlandsPlaces on 24 June 2025, folding their records into trove.scot, which had launched in February. HES said the old websites were too old to keep safe. Lecturers, archaeologists and family historians were told to use the new site instead.

Scran addresses were not set to redirect. HES told users the rest of that image archive might take until March 2026. By October 2026 the specialist search those people actually used had still not come back in the same form.

Canmore, Scran and ScotlandsPlaces Went Dark in June

HES published the retiral statement on 12 May 2025 and last updated it on 30 June. The charity said it inherited the sites from earlier bodies and projects and can no longer support them safely and securely. On 24 June it also closed the Property in Care Collections site and the old National Collection of Aerial Photography address at ncap.org.uk.

Trove, HES said, would take Canmore, Scran and the Property in Care records, with old Canmore addresses sent on to the matching Trove page. The same notice said Scran addresses would not redirect, though the team was looking at that. Britain from Above was left running.

Scottish schools were warned through Glow Connect. The University of Stirling library added Trove to its A-Z list and said it would drop Scran on 24 June, and asked lecturers to mend reading lists for the next academic year. That warning sat when the three sites were listed for closure, weeks before the plug was pulled.

THE SITES THAT WENT OFF ON 24 JUNE

HES also said Trove already held more than 2 million records from Canmore and Scran, with more still to move, and that staff were rebuilding popular tools from the old sites as they went.

Dead Links in Reading Lists and Funding Bids

The people who used these sites every week were not in the launch copy. They are the contract archaeologist writing a desk assessment, the lecturer whose module still points at a Scran still, and the family historian who treated ScotlandsPlaces as a single front door for three national collections.

Archaeologist Kenny Brophy put the professional shock in one post on 14 May 2025, after Past Glasgow flagged the 24 June date.

For me this is a nightmare and worst of all, virtually no-one I know realises this is about to happen. Trove doesn’t do what I need it to do so this is hugely disappointing.

Kenny Brophy, archaeologist, 14 May 2025

Heritage data researcher Claire Boardman replied that she was about to send a funding bid that listed Canmore as the main data source, too late to change. That is the quiet cost of a national catalogue: years of grant forms, excavation reports and reading lists were written against one address.

HES told MyCanmore users their accounts would not move. Anyone who wanted to order digitisation, obtain a reuse licence or add a contribution on Trove would have to register again, once those tools were ready. User contributions were still being built when the old sites went off.

What Canmore Held for Scottish Archaeology

Canmore was the public catalogue of the National Record of the Historic Environment. RCAHMS launched it in 1997 as the Computer Application for National Monuments Record Enquiries, after decades of paper and photograph collecting that ran back through the National Monuments Record of Scotland, founded in 1966. HES has kept the record since 2015.

The live data download on Trove still describes that record as more than 320,000 site locations and a related archive of over 1.3 million items. The points cover archaeology, buildings, industry and maritime sites, including official wrecks. The GIS layer is issued under the Open Government Licence.

Most of that place and archive content had already been copied into Trove by the June switch-off, HES said, including the thesauri used to search by monument type. Canmore addresses would keep working as redirects. That promise mattered because twenty-eight years of reports, footnotes and bookmarks pointed at canmore.org.uk.

What did not copy across in the same shape was the working method built on those thesauri. On Canmore, a classification such as a radar station opened a thesaurus entry and a command to display every site of that type, then a map, then a CSV download, in a couple of clicks. On Trove, the same classification opened a thesaurus entry and some related images. A keyword search for “radar” threw back hundreds of place records that were not the classified set.

That gap is why contract staff and academic archaeologists treated the new site as a different product, not a new coat of paint on the same catalogue.

Scran’s Classroom Pictures Were Still in Transit

The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network started in 1995 as an education project. Its founding partners were National Museums Scotland, RCAHMS, the body now called Museums Galleries Scotland, and the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum. The website went live in 1997. RCAHMS took Scran on in 2008. HES absorbed it in 2015.

A project beginning in 2024 accessioned the Scran files into the main HES archive. The retired-services page now sends the public to a SCRAN collection on Trove. That is not the same as saying every still, film and sound file from the old site is findable, or that an old scran.ac.uk link will land on it.

On 30 June 2025 HES said over 50,000 images had been moved, with the other 200,000 digital images, moving images and sounds still to come because the files are held for other contributors. The whole archive, and the pathfinder teaching packs, were expected by March 2026. Until then, HES asked people who could not find an item to write to archives@hes.scot.

On 15 December 2025, six months after Scran was switched off, HES posted a short film in which archivist Stef still described the collection as being moved into Trove. Schools and community groups had used those files for decades. The film is the official record of that unfinished hand-over.

University of Stirling library staff had already told lecturers, in May 2025, that the Scran transfer was not scheduled to finish until March 2026. Glow users were pointed at Trove on the same timetable. Old reading-list links died on 24 June anyway.

Three Million Records Behind a New Search

HES launched Trove as one door for the Historic Environment Portal, Canmore, Scran and the Property in Care Collections. The launch text put over 5,000 years of Scottish history in about 3 million records, including designation records, the archaeology and buildings catalogue, over 2,000 objects from HES properties, and Scran’s education media. That 3 million figure is the whole shop window. The 2 million figure on the retiral page was the Canmore and Scran slice already loaded in June 2025.

Katerina Brown, Chief Executive of Historic Environment Scotland, tied the build to a wider digital spend.

We are excited to be bringing heritage even closer to people’s everyday lives with this new platform. trove.scot will make it easier to learn about the heritage and historic environment that surrounds you, whether that is the listed buildings on your street or archive images of historic events that shaped communities.

Katerina Brown, Chief Executive, Historic Environment Scotland, Trove launch

Map search, themed collections, public contributions and a public roadmap were part of the pitch. Trove develops in response to feedback, HES said, and ships updates on a regular cycle. Browsing does not need an account.

The professional complaint is narrower than “the records vanished.” They did not. The complaint is that Trove searches like a modern discovery site and Canmore searched like a monuments inventory.

WHAT DID NOT TRAVEL TO TROVE

• Scran addresses: Old scran.ac.uk links were not redirected, and HES was only exploring that function when the site closed.
• MyCanmore logins: Saved accounts were not copied, so licences and digitisation orders need a new Trove registration.
• Type-to-list-to-CSV: The two-click path from a monument class to a full site list, a map and a spreadsheet did not return in the same form.
• Image resolution: Desk work that depends on reading inscriptions is weaker, because Trove serves lower-resolution files than Canmore did.
• User contributions: Adding material, and some licence tools, were still in development when the old sites went off.

In July 2026, more than a year after the switch-off, that resolution gap was still being raised as a reason Trove is a poor stand-in for Canmore on inscription-heavy research. Built Environment Forum Scotland was still pointing members at a public form in May 2026. Some local history accounts now cite Trove image numbers in the same way they once cited Scran IDs, which is proof the files are there for everyday picture use. It is not proof the inventory tools came with them.

ScotlandsPlaces Now Sits on Three Other Sites

ScotlandsPlaces was never only an HES product. It joined place records from HES, the National Library of Scotland and National Records of Scotland. HES called the site end of life and turned it off on 24 June 2025 with the others.

Users were sent back to the three parents. HES material sits on Trove. Library material sits on nls.uk and on the National Library historic maps service. National Records of Scotland material sits on ScotlandsPeople. Family historians who used one search box for those three stores now run three searches, and they need to know which body holds which class of document.

That split is finished. It is also easy to miss if someone only heard that “everything is going to Trove.” Trove does not replace the Library’s map stack or the civil-registration and census side of ScotlandsPeople. It replaces the HES slice.

PastMap and the Risk Register Remain in the Queue

The 24 June closures were the first cut, not the last. In the same notice HES said it was aiming, later in 2025, to retire Scotland’s Historic Land Use Assessment and, longer term, to look at the Historic Environment Portal, PastMap, the Dictionary of Scottish Architects and the Buildings at Risk Register. The retired-services page that now lists Canmore, Scran, ScotlandsPlaces and ncap.org.uk does not yet list those later names as gone.

The Buildings at Risk Register is already in a separate stall. After a Harlow Consulting review, HES paused BARR rather than folding it into Trove on a set date. The old BARR site stays up as a frozen resource. Nominations are closed. As of January 2024, 2,219 buildings were on the register. Trove offers that frozen dataset as a download, dated to the 2024 pause.

PastMap, the public map that stacks HES data with local Historic Environment Records, was still being described on its own site as a portal, not as a contractor tool for planning. If it goes, the next group to inherit broken habits will be the same desk-based researchers who just lost Canmore’s classified lists.

HOW THE ARCHIVE SITES WERE WOUND DOWN

1. 1995: Scran is set up as a national education network for museum and archive media.
2. 1997: Canmore launches as the online catalogue of the national monuments record; the Scran website goes live the same year.
3. 2008 to 2015: Scran moves into RCAHMS, then both Canmore and Scran move into Historic Environment Scotland.
4. February 2025: trove.scot launches as the combined public site.
5. 12 May 2025: HES posts the retiral statement, with 24 June as the switch-off date.
6. 24 June 2025: Canmore, Scran, ScotlandsPlaces, Property in Care Collections and ncap.org.uk go offline.
7. 30 June 2025: HES last updates the numbered retiral page, still pointing Scran’s remaining 200,000 files at March 2026.
8. 15 December 2025: An official HES film still describes the Scran collection as being moved.
9. 18 May 2026: Built Environment Forum Scotland is still asking members to fill in Trove feedback.

HES still asks anyone who cannot find a Scran file to email archives@hes.scot. The public Trove feedback survey stays open until 28 February 2027.