Caernarfon · Gwynedd · Est. 2009
Everything you build starts from a measurement.
GRATICULE is a chartered survey practice working the coast and uplands of north-west Wales. We establish where the ground actually is — to the millimetre where that matters, and honestly about it where it doesn’t — and hand the design team something they can build on.
RICS regulated TSA member 17 staff 1,900+ jobs
A — → B — · drag either station on the sheet, or focus it and use the arrow keys.
Topographic survey
→Detail and levels across open ground, from a half-hectare infill plot to a forty-hectare coastal realignment. Delivered as a survey-grade DWG with a separate levelled surface, not a flat drawing with spot heights typed on.
OS grid or site grid1:200 to 1:1000±15 mm typical 02Measured building survey
→Plans, sections and elevations of what is actually standing, including the parts that are out of plumb. Historic fabric is scanned before it is drawn, so the drawing can be checked against the cloud rather than against memory.
Level 1 to Level 4Revit or DWGListed-building experience 03Terrestrial laser scanning
→Registered point clouds for retrofit, clash detection and record. We publish the registration report with the cloud, so you can see the residual on every setup instead of taking the alignment on trust.
E57 & RCPRegistered < 4 mmPanoramic imagery 04Bathymetric & hydrographic survey
→Single-beam and multibeam work in the estuaries and harbours along this coast, tied to the same datum as the land survey so the two halves of a sea wall meet in the middle. Tidal reduction from our own gauge, not an assumed curve.
IHO Order 1aReduced to ODN & CDVessel to 8 m 05UAV photogrammetry
→Aerial capture where ground access is slow, unsafe or would take a week — quarry faces, roofs, forestry tracks, active earthworks. Always flown against ground control, because a flight without it is a picture, not a survey.
CAA operational authorisationOrthomosaic & DSM±25 mm to control 06Setting out & as-built
→Control networks, setting out to the design model, and the as-built check that proves what went in. We keep the network adjusted for the life of the job, so month eleven is measured from the same points as week one.
Least-squares adjustedSame-day as-builtsDeviation reporting 07Structural monitoring
→Movement watched over months on retaining structures, quay walls and buildings next to deep excavation, with agreed trigger levels and a named person who phones when one is crossed rather than emailing a spreadsheet.
Automated or periodicSub-millimetre precisionAmber & red triggers 08Utility detection to PAS 128
→Electromagnetic and GPR detection of what is already under the site, surveyed in and stated at a quality level you can plan around. A drawing that quietly mixes QL-B and QL-D is worse than no drawing.
QL-D to QL-B2GPR & EMLLevelled & attributedTraeth Melynog realignment
Forty-one hectares of saltmarsh and foreshore surveyed twice, eleven months apart, so the county could argue about erosion from numbers instead of photographs.
J‑24552026–06Capel Nant, Llanberis
A Grade II* chapel with a slate roof nobody wanted to walk on. Scanned from fourteen setups and a tethered UAV, drawn to Level 3, re-roofed off our sections.
J‑24702026–08Cwm Aderyn access track
Six kilometres of new track to a repowering site, set out across ground with no mobile signal and a 22% ruling gradient. The sheet on this page is its survey.
Brief
What the survey has to decide, who receives it, and in which software it has to open.
Recon
A walk-over before a price. Access, sightlines, tides, livestock, and what the site is hiding.
Control
A network observed and least-squares adjusted, with witness diagrams, before any detail.
Field
Detail, levels, scans and soundings, checked into the network as they are collected.
Adjust
Reduction, adjustment and a residual report. If something did not close, you are told.
Deliver
Drawing, model and report together, with the control schedule so the next firm can pick it up.
05 — The archive
Every job is a sheet, and we keep it.
Nineteen hundred jobs since 2009 are held as adjusted networks with their raw observations, not as flattened PDFs. When a client comes back seven years later because a boundary is being argued or an extension is going in, we re-issue from the original data on the original datum.
It also means a repeat visit is cheaper than a first one, sometimes by half: the control is already there, already witnessed, and still adjusts.
- Held since
- March 2009
- Jobs archived
- 1,912
- Retention
- Indefinite, with raw observations
- Re-issue
- Two working days, typical
- Datum
- OSGB36 / ODN, or your site grid