The Quays of Ballinacurra

In June of 2018 a team of 3 researchers from UCD spent 4 days documenting the riverine landscape of Ballinacurra, capturing the form of the quays, the industrial buildings, and part of the village itself, much to the bemusement and curiosity of the local population, who were generous with much needed offerings of water, tea, and sometimes beer. The documentation used terrestrial Lidar equipment, which uses lasers to document objects, and included an in-house mid-range scanner and a long-range scanner rented to scan across the width of the river. A total of 53 separate scans were taken reaching from near the tumulus at Ballinacorra house, up river to the pedestrian bridge on the road to Midleton, and along the original spine of the village to the now derelict industrial site of J.H. Bennett. Once merged over the course of several weeks, these scans generated a full-scale three-dimensional digital record of the town, harbour, and industrial buildings in a 77GB file (Figure 2). Land-based objects, such as the warehouses, were easily scanned in considerable detail (Figure 3). Quay walls are more difficult to scan thus, despite a long-range scanner, some of the quay walls near the derelict Cloyne Clay Company site were less than adequately documented. The team will return in the summer of 2019 to capture additional detail using a technique called photogrammetry, where photographs can be used to create a point cloud that can then be merged with the original scan data.