A database of information about 280,000 Scottish archaeological and architecture sites has been updated with some interactive features. I’m glad to learn about it, because I’d never heard of it before. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland has its database, Canmore, available at http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/ .

The front page has a simple keyword search available or you can use an extensive advanced search form that allows you to search by location, site type, ID, online collections only, and more.

I stuck with the simple site search and looked for castle, restricting my results to online items only. I found 1,482 results. Results (it looks like you can get only 500 at a time) are listed 20 to a page, with a thumbnail of the site, site name, site type, council, and collection items. There are two types of collection items: those that are online (those are listed first) and those that are available in the search room (and those may be images, maps, manuscripts, etc. There is information about how to order them but they are not available online.)

Each listing has its own page; here’s the one for Castle Tioram.There are some images available for the site as well as architectural and archaeological descriptions and book citations. Visitors are invited to submit their own sites and images as well.

If you’re less interested in browsing the database and more interested in looking at the images, you might want to check out the RCAHMS Flickr stream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24880758@N02/. There are 228 images here covering everything from distilleries to castle ruins to rock carvings.