Bruton Dovecote

Lusty Hill, Bruton · ST 683 344Work in progress

17:48

The tower today: roofless, with doves in the 18th-century nest holes.

Notes on this model

A work-in-progress reconstruction of the tower on Lusty Hill, Bruton: a late-medieval or Tudor tower that became a Berkeley prospect tower in the abbey deer park, then a dovecote. It has been in the care of the National Trust since 1915.

How it was made

Built from a site visit on 29 September 2026: about 240 photos, three phone LiDAR scans, tape measurements and compass bearings. Every stone is modelled individually as a flat-bedded block with its own chipped, worn outline and pitted face (no photo textures), set in lime mortar; weathering is layered over stones and joints alike, as on the real walls: sheets of old lime render and limewash worn thin at their edges, grey crustose lichen, run-off streaks and damp near the ground, all matched by eye against the face photos. The c. 1650 tower shows the same stone much fresher, with lichen, damp at the base and rain streaks added in the shader. Course heights, quoins, window dressings, relieving arches, the crack, the lime repairs and the broken south-west gable follow photos of each face that were corrected for perspective. Each stone's colour is sampled from those photos and snapped to a palette of Doulting and local rubble tones. Bruton itself comes from OpenStreetMap: roads, the railway, the River Brue, woodland, sports pitches, the field boundary and the gate, and every mapped building footprint, including St Mary's. Houses are added to residential areas where OSM has no buildings drawn. Beyond the town, the hills are shaped to match the skyline in a 30-photo panorama taken beside the tower.

What's measured, estimated and guessed

MeasuredPlan about 6.2 m square outside, from LiDAR. The tape gave 6.19–6.56 m and this still needs checking.
MeasuredDoorway 0.83 m wide, 1.97 m to the top of the arch. Wall 0.86 m at the door. Inside diagonals 4.77 m, with the corners filled so the room is nearly octagonal.
MeasuredFaces point to about 25°, 115°, 205° and 295°, about 20° off the NE/SE/SW/NW names used in the listing.
EstimatedWall top about 9.0 m and gable peaks about 12.2 m, from four photos using the camera's focal length. All four agree within 0.5 m.
EstimatedWindow positions come from the corrected photos. The field boundary and gate come from OpenStreetMap; the field edge is left open, as it is today.
MeasuredThe hill, the valley of the Brue and the town's ground come from the Environment Agency's 1 m LiDAR terrain model (2022), sampled at 2 m within a kilometre of the tower and 25 m out to about 12 km. Where tiles are missing (mostly east and south-east beyond 1.6 km), the hills are guessed from the panorama skyline and blended into the real data.
EstimatedNest band: six tiers of tufa blocks set in a checkerboard with slate ledges, about 200 holes (per the listing), with its height taken from photos. The inside of the tower rises from a raised earth floor about 0.5 m above the ground outside (from LiDAR). Below the band the corners are flat chamfers (phone LiDAR scan, matching the 4.77 m tape diagonals); in the band they curve round, as in the photos. The band's lowest tiers run down beside the top windows and its top tier runs over their oak lintels (photos IMG_3371 and IMG_3375).
EstimatedNettles, docks and rank grass along the foot of the walls, trodden earth at the door and a few fallen stones follow the face photos. About a third of the busier nest holes have twig nests with a sitting bird.
GuessThe rows of joist sockets for the two lost floors are placed from the floor levels below, not yet measured on site. Feathers, guano and the doves' roosting holes follow the interior photos.

Light, weather and life

CalculatedThe sun and moon follow their real paths over Lusty Hill on 29 September, the survey day, in British Summer Time. The light through the open top and the window splays is traced through the real wall thickness, so the shafts inside fall where they would.
EstimatedShowers blow in from the south-west, the prevailing wind, and leave the stone and grass wet for a while. Rainbows appear opposite a low sun as a shower clears.
EstimatedDoves roost in the nest holes and on the gables, as seen on the visit. Rooks, the skylark over the pasture and the tawny owl at night are typical of the area but weren't recorded on the day. Their calls are synthesised.
GuessLit windows in the town at night are illustrative.

The c. 1650 reconstruction

GuessA cross-gabled stone-slate roof with a chimney. An early 18th-century drawing, quoted by Couzens (1968), shows the tower roofed with a chimney. The drawing itself hasn't been found.
GuessThe chimney is placed on the south-west gable, the one that is now cut down. Its removal could explain the damage, but this is a hypothesis.
GuessFloor levels are set from the window sills. The blocked middle-floor windows are shown open, following the four two-light windows mentioned in the National Trust record.
GuessDeer park with short tree avenues to the east, south-east and south of the tower (Victoria County History). The Berkeley mansion is simplified from a drawing of about 1748 and S.H. Grimm's 1786 watercolours. It is placed at the King's School site.
GuessA trap hatch in each floor with a ladder up through it, set between the joists.
GuessA ground floor of blue lias flagstones, laid in rows, in place of today's earth floor.
GuessA first-floor fireplace on the south-west wall. The listing records the remains of a fireplace, but it isn't yet located on the survey.
GuessIn c. 1650 the railway (1856), footpaths, sports pitches and modern housing are removed, and the roads become earth lanes. The town is cut back to the church and a strip of mapped buildings along the north bank of the River Brue (the High Street area), as a rough stand-in for the 17th-century town. Individual buildings aren't dated.
GuessNo doves. The conversion to a dovecote dates from the 1700s.

Sources

National Trust Heritage Record MNA137013
Historic England listing 1056424 and scheduling 1019895
Victoria County History, Somerset vol. 7: Bruton
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
Landed Families: Berkeley of Bruton Abbey (Grimm watercolours and the c.1748 drawing)
Tree-ring dates of 1554–86 for the door and window frames (Alcock & Tyers, Vernacular Architecture 42, 2011)

Still to do

Laser-measure the heights, floor-beam sockets, nest holes and fireplace, and locate the fireplace.
Fill the remaining LiDAR gaps (ST73sw, ST73se, ST73ne, ST72ne, ST64sw) to replace the guessed distant hills.
Get the Harcourt (2010) assessment and the antiquarian file from the National Trust.
Test and tune the VR version on a Quest 3 (standalone and PC VR).

Privacy

Visits and a few anonymous events (such as finishing the dove game or entering VR) are counted with GoatCounter, which uses no cookies and stores no personal data. Game progress is saved only in your own browser.

Photos, scans and survey by James Nation. Model by Claude.

Getting around

Orbit

Drag to circle the tower, scroll or pinch to zoom, right-drag or two-finger drag to pan.

Walk

Like a first-person game: click the view to look around with the mouse, WASD to move, Shift to hurry, Esc to get the mouse back. On a phone or tablet, use the stick in the bottom-left corner, drag to look, and tap the ground to walk there.

You can go through the door, out to the field edge, down to the gate and some way down the north slope.

Seven strays

A light game: find the seven glowing doves around the hill, then the golden traces they lead you to. With the mouse captured, aim the centre dot and click. The dove button under the title lists clues.

Time and weather

Drag the sun slider to change the time of day, or press play to let the day run. The cloud button switches between passing showers and fair weather.

VR

On a headset (Meta Quest, or PC VR in Chrome or Edge) a headset button appears at the top right. Aim with either trigger and release to teleport, walk with the left stick, and snap-turn with the right. A or X switches between Today and c. 1650, B or Y steps through the day, and clicking the left stick changes the weather. The controls are also on a card on your left wrist.

Viewpoints

Jump to set views, including the first-floor window. In the c. 1650 version there are floors to stand on: walk to the foot of a ladder to climb it, and step into the hatch to go back down.

Lusty Hill · Bruton · Somerset

Bruton Dovecote

A 3D reconstruction of the tower as it is today and as it may have looked around 1650, when it stood roofed in the Berkeley deer park.

Best with sound on. Works on desktop and phone.