Cowgate - 1544

The Cowgate lies towards the southern side of Edinburgh’s historic Old Town. It probably developed as a street in the early fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century Cowgate was considered one of the more prosperous parts of Edinburgh. The writer and theologian Alexander Alesius (who was born in Edinburgh in 1500) claimed that Cowgate was where ‘the nobility and chief men of the burgh reside’. In the early sixteenth century the archbishop of St Andrews had a residence there, which survived until Victorian times. In 2017 the University of St Andrews’ Open Virtual Worlds team and Smart History created a digital representation of Cowgate in the sixteenth century. The video shows housing and then the churchyard which ran down the hill from the back of St Giles’ Kirk. The reconstruction was part of a wider project imagining the appearance of Edinburgh in 1544 (the year of a major attack by an English army led by the Earl of Hertford). The project was funded by Innovate UK. A virtual reality version of the reconstruction can be explored with the free Edinburgh 1544 app.

Sarah Kennedy, Iain Oliver, Bess Rhodes, Catherine Anne Cassidy, CJ Davies, Adeola Fabola, John McCaffrey, Alan Miller

Richard Fawcett (University of St Andrews), John Lawson (CECAS), Bess Rhodes (University of St Andrews)

A digital landscape was created using survey data and height map. Models were created in 3D modelling programs and imported into UNREAL (a cross-platform game engine for creating virtual worlds). The models were then scaled, orientated and assembled. The landscapes were populated with flora and fauna. Where applicable, models of characters and animals were imported and animated.