A computer-based method of morphological recording and classification devised by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England is described, and its advantages argued. It has special relevance to schemes for monument protection, in which there is urgent need to assess the relative importance of thousands of sites known only from air photography, but it could have wider applications in the rapid descriptive recording and primary analysis of complex systems of standing remains. The data are held on Foxbase+, a relational database; work on Kent is nearly complete and output in various forms is available.