This week Tom and Tehmina Goskar joined us from Penzance to create a digital survey of Giant’s Castle Maze. Tom Goskar is an artist, archaeologist and technologist specialising in 3D capture and enhancement (think making petroglyphs, decorated stones, or inscriptions easier to see and study), Generative AI, and audiovisual techniques.

I first met Tom last September when he was on Scilly working on Porths and Gigs - a survey of Scilly’s historic pilot gig sheds led by Cathy Parkes of Cornwall Archeology Unit, which I was also volunteering on. As we trekked out across St Agnes to the ruined sheds at Porth Askin, Tom and I talked a bit about why I had volunteered to help on the project: my interest in Scilly’s heritage and archaeology in general, but specifically my desire to learn how create an accurate archeological survey in order to support my plans to restore Giant’s Castle labyrinth.

Tom is also a folklorist - focussing particularly on the seasonal celebrations of the South West and traditional Cornish music and dance - and so he was interested to hear more about the labyrinth project. He is a font of knowledge about all manner of folkloric symbology, and has even made a labyrinth before, so we had a lot to talk about.

When we arrived at Porth Askin and I helped the other archaeologists to set up the traditional plane table survey equipment - tripod, alidade and measuring sticks - while Tom produced a number of cameras and poles from his backpack and began climbing back and forth over the beach to photograph the whole area. His scan of the beach was complete in a fraction of the time that our more traditional survey method was.

Tom Goskar digitally surveying Porth Askin for *Porths and Gigs,* September 2024.

A few weeks later, when it came time to present the findings of Ports and Gigs to the community at St Agnes Island Hall, Tom presented a digital model of the entire bay in all it’s detail, showing all the gig sheds as well as the drangs - the passageways through the rocks cleared by old Scillonians so they could get their gigs between the beach and the sea, even at the lowest of tides. This amazing map of the topology could be zoomed in and out, and spun around to be viewed from new angles. This enabled us to spot new features in the landscape that had not visible to us on the ground.

A big influence for the labyrinth project, that I don’t think we have really talked about yet was the classic Channel 4 series Time Team. We had wanted to approach the Giant’s Castle Maze as if we were similar archaeological investigators - and Tom’s digital survey seemed like the natural evolution of the early computer mapping used on the show to make archaeological details visible and accessible to a wider audience.

We learned with great dismay that the Giant’s Castle site was not suitable for a geophysics survey - too small and too bumpy to create meaningful results. But that Tom’s techniques could easily be utilised to map smaller sites like ours, and his methods - which innovatively blend art, archaeology and technology - could be the perfect way to understand our site more fully. Indeed Tom had already scanned a number of ancient sites in Cornwall, in order to reveal previously unknown details.

Tom and his wife Tehmina Goskar (who is a Research Fellow at University of the Arts London, a Research Curator at the Museum of Cornish Life in Helston, and a specialist on precious stone and minerals - more on that in another blog post!) - arrived on Scilly on windy drizzly morning. After warming up over coffees at the airport cafe, we began our expedition out to Giant’s Castle. Tom began by walking the labyrinth and taking in the surrounding area, in order to get a better understanding of the site. He then produced one of many cameras and began by taking a gaussian splat render of the site, before moving on to lidar and photogrammetry techniques.

Tom Goskar digitally surveying Giant’s Castle Maze, 2025.

Unfortunately for us, the weather was not on our side and conditions steadily worsened. Luckily Tom was able to keep moisture droplets off his lens - which would ruin his results - with a small, sacrificial umbrella. He managed to capture just enough information before the rain really started, and we were forced to retreat to the nearest cafe for a fortifying cream tea.

While we dried off, Tom showed me a sneak peak of what he had created so far - an incredible, milky-white photogrammetry scan of the Giant’s Castle Maze, which clearly showed how it’s contours sat in the surrounding landscape, which was totally featureless in comparison. Seeing this enigmatic site, which I am growing to know so well, rendered in this undeniably present way - despite years of becoming neglected and overgrown, made me feel oddly emotional. Despite it’s "vanishing” status, it was so undeniably there when you looked at the empty ground around it to compare. This reminded me of something Cathy Parkes had told me, back when I first met Tom while volunteering on Ports and Gigs, that once you do something to alter the ground, it’s never the same again, and you can always read these interventions in the landscape. Here, in Tom’s scan, was proof that these maze makers - whoever they were - working all those years ago, had created something real and tangible, with undeniable longevity. And even if we were to do nothing at all to restore it, and it was allowed it too become further overgrown, the marks of those actions could always be read in the land, if you knew where and how to look for them.

I am really excited to see what else Tom’s scans are able to reveal to us about this almost-lost labyrinth, and how we might best approach any restoration of the site. So many thanks to Tom and Tehmina for braving the rainy Scilly coastline with us for this project.

Scanning Giant’s Castle Maze: Lidar and Photogrammetry Survey

Giant’s Castle WWI Look Out Station