A Photogrammetric Survey and Reconstruction of Rousseau’s Cave

It remains a little-known fact that from March 1766 to May 1767 Jean-Jacques Rousseau – fleeing from persecution in France and Switzerland – stayed in the remote hamlet of Wootton in Staffordshire. There he composed the first half of his Confessions in a garden hermitage, a structure half natural and half architectural, ever since known as Rousseau’s Cave. Our paper records the hermitage in its current state (exposed to the elements); it creates a digital reconstruction of the hermitage as it was in Rousseau’s lifetime; and it provides digital access to a monument that is otherwise not generally accessible. Our paper records a modest but fairly typical eighteenth-century garden hermitage and also, with the highest quality digital reconstructions and fly-throughs, provides a new insight into the creation of one of the world’s greatest works of literature. The paper contributes substantial new material to the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and also contributes to garden history and the phenomenon of the garden hermitage.