What is the Northern Ireland Heritage Tool?
The Northern Ireland Heritage Tool is an interactive research resource designed to help explore the historic landscape of Northern Ireland through its electoral wards. Rather than focusing on individual monuments in isolation, the tool allows users to examine how archaeology, settlement history, landscape, and placenames combine within a defined local area.
Northern Ireland contains tens of thousands of recorded heritage sites, ranging from prehistoric tombs and early medieval ecclesiastical centres to castles, plantations, and industrial heritage. These records are normally spread across multiple databases and mapping systems. The Heritage Tool brings this information together into a single searchable interface, allowing each ward to be viewed as a historical landscape in its own right.
By organising heritage data geographically, the tool makes it easier to understand long-term patterns of human activity. Users can identify areas of dense prehistoric occupation, medieval settlement clusters, or regions shaped by later historic developments. The result is not simply a list of monuments, but a contextual overview of how communities interacted with the landscape over thousands of years.
This approach reflects how archaeologists increasingly interpret Ireland’s past: as interconnected cultural landscapes rather than isolated sites.
Search for a ward’s heritage profile:
How to use the Northern Ireland heritage tool?
Using the Northern Ireland Heritage Tool is straightforward and requires no specialist knowledge.
Begin by entering at least two characters into the search box. The search function will suggest electoral wards across Northern Ireland. Once a ward is selected, the tool automatically generates a heritage profile based on available datasets.
Each ward profile presents an overview of recorded archaeological and historic assets associated with that area. Users can explore the character of the landscape, identify dominant monument types, and gain a clearer understanding of historical development within local boundaries.
The tool can be used in several ways. Local residents may wish to discover the deeper history of their community. Researchers and students can use it as a starting point for landscape analysis. Genealogists may find it helpful for placing family history within a broader historical environment. Visitors and heritage enthusiasts can also use the tool to identify areas of archaeological interest beyond well-known tourist sites.
Because the system operates at ward level, it encourages exploration of Northern Ireland’s everyday historic landscapes as well as its famous monuments.
Methodology behind the Heritage Tool
This tool was borne out of my own desire to better understand Northern Ireland’s heritage spatially. The sheer volume of sites and span of history can be overwhelming. This tool helps structure this data in a way which is hopefully meaningful for researchers, hobbyists, and anyone really with an interest in history.
This tool presents heritage data for all 462 Northern Ireland electoral wards, drawn from a bespoke spatial pipeline developed by Daniel Kirkpatrick. Each ward’s record was built by spatially joining three statutory heritage registers to ward boundary polygons using point-in-polygon assignment. Heritage density figures (sites per km²) exclude listed buildings and are calculated against the full ward area derived from the OSNI ward boundary dataset.
Period classification for Historic Sites follows a multi-pass lexicon applied to the NISMR site type vocabulary, with Roman period excluded from Northern Ireland records. Placename heritage classifications use a custom classifier applied to the OS Open Names dataset, categorising toponyms by linguistic tradition (Pre-Christian Gaelic, Early Christian, Norse, Norman, Plantation). Terrain data is derived from the Copernicus GLO-30 Digital Elevation Model and ESA WorldCover 2021 land cover product, aggregated to ward level. Where a data field shows a dash or is absent, the underlying record did not contain sufficient information to compute the metric reliably.
Data Sources
Below is the list of all data sources used to create this tool:
- Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record (NISMR) — Historic Environment Division, Department for Communities NI. Contains all recorded archaeological and historic sites in Northern Ireland.
- HED Scheduled Monument Zones — Historic Environment Division. Statutory scheduled monument polygon boundaries (Scheduled Zones shapefile, March 2026).
- HED Listed Buildings — Historic Environment Division. Statutory list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest in Northern Ireland.
- Northern Ireland ward boundaries — Office for National Statistics / Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), Census 2021 electoral ward polygons.
- OS Open Names — Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland / Ordnance Survey (Great Britain). Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Placename data from Logainm
- Copernicus GLO-30 Digital Elevation Model — European Space Agency / Copernicus Land Service. 30-metre resolution global DEM. Used for elevation, slope, and Topographic Wetness Index calculations. ESA WorldCover 2021 — European Space Agency. 10-metre resolution global land cover product. Used for grassland, woodland, cropland, wetland, and urban coverage estimates.
Copyright and Attribution
Heritage data The Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record, HED Scheduled Monument Zones, and HED Listed Buildings data are © Crown Copyright and database right, Historic Environment Division, Department for Communities, Northern Ireland. Used under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 (nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence). No warranty is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the data.
Boundary data Ward boundary data is © Crown Copyright and database right, NISRA / OSNI 2021. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Terrain and satellite data Copernicus GLO-30 DEM is made freely available under the Copernicus DEM licence. ESA WorldCover is © European Space Agency, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
Placename data OS Open Names is © Crown Copyright and database right 2024, published by Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Tool and analysis The data pipeline, spatial analysis, period classification, placename heritage classification, ward-level aggregation, written summaries, and this web tool are © Daniel Kirkpatrick 2026. All rights reserved. The derived dataset (ni_ward_heritage.json) is an original analytical work and may not be reproduced, redistributed, or used to train machine learning models without prior written permission.