About Cave Maps

CaveMaps has existed for many years now, with a vision to make as many of northern England's cave surveys as possible freely available online.

This bold vision was developed into the original outstanding resource by Andy Powell, featuring surveys of many of our most popular systems. In 2010, Andy won the Arthur Butcher Award to recognise such a significant contribution to cave surveying. Andy helped to evolve the site over time to embrace new technologies for displaying surveys including 'DeepZoom' but as time progressed further, keeping the site up to date with modern website standards became more demanding.

To ensure the continuity of CaveMaps, Andy approached CNCC in 2026 to consider adopting the site, which we were honoured to be asked, and delighted to accept.

In 2026, CaveMaps was redeveloped by CNCC's web administrator, Gary Douthwaite (a professional web developer who gives his time for free to his CNCC role). Gary rebuilt the website from-scratch (but with heavy inspiration from the original site aesthetics and functions), including a database that links seamlessly to the cave database on the main CNCC website, and to allow surveys to be more efficiently searched, submitted and viewed.

The site you see today is the culmination of lots of hard work, by Andy to develop the original site and populate it with thousands of surveys (and probably a similar number of regular users), and more recently by Gary to rebuild the site to modern web-design standards and integrate it into CNCC's existing web services.

You will also find a significant number of new surveys being made available as part of the CaveMaps overhaul, with hopefully many more to come.

Thanks also go to every individual and club who has given permission for their surveys to be made digitally available. Populating the site with more surveys is going to need input from the entire caving community, so we welcome any assistance to identify gaps, seek permissions, and supply high quality digital files (originals or scans). There is now a 'submit a survey' function which you can use to quickly and easily upload a survey to the site.

In-fitting with CNCC's regional council area, we welcome surveys covering all of northern England: Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, and northwards, including Scotland.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or would like any more information, please feel free to drop us an email. Please note that, as with CNCC, we're all volunteers and we can't always respond quickly but we'll do our best. This email address is monitored by more than one person.

Copyright

CaveMaps encourages the free distribution and sharing of cave surveys. However, we also respect that for surveys still in-print, or where there is some commercial value, or simply due to personal preference, the publisher may not yet wish to make a survey freely available online. Surveys available on CaveMaps are published under a CC BY-NC Creative Commons Licence. This means that site users are able to use, distribute, adapt, and build upon the surveys, providing attribution is given to the original creator, but not for commercial purposes.

The CNCC also uses Creative Commons Licences for all of our publications including newsletters, cave descriptions and rigging topos. We believe it is a progressive approach for non-commercial publishing.

We make every effort to ensure permission is in place before adding a survey to the site, however, sometimes we rely on the accuracy of third-party information to confirm those permissions. If you are the copyright holder of any survey on this site and you either did not give permission for the survey to be displayed and you wish us to remove it, or you wish to withdraw previous permission, please report this and we will remove the survey as quickly as possible.

Contributor Credits

The following clubs and individuals have given permission for their surveys to appear on CaveMaps:

Without their assistance, this site would have limited value. If you would like your name to be added to this list, please get in touch - cavemaps@cncc.org.uk

Many individuals and clubs, too numerous to mention individually, have also assisted with CaveMaps over the years, by providing GPS coordinates, pointing out errors and omissions, providing hints and suggestions on where to track down elusive surveys, lending journals and surveys for scanning, and most importantly by providing free access to several club libraries and personal collections.