How many caving clubs, and how many caves?

wookey

Active member
A simple survey about UK caving practice (mostly with respect to surveying) also asked how many caves and how many caving clubs there are in the UK. I found it surprisingly difficult to find out a plausible answer to either of these questions. BCA must know approx how many clubs there as most (all?) must be BCA member clubs. 150 clubs? 200? more?

And someone must have a fairly good idea how many caves there are, although possibly only regionally.

Is this info available somewhere, or can someone tell me?

I did find that there are 182 caves >1km long and >60m deep in the UK + Ireland. I estimate that if you include all the poxy caves too we have something in the 1-2500 range?

And yes I know 'caves' vs 'entrances' and 'is a rock-shelters a cave?' is a complicated subject, but 'thing that is a cave and/or gets an entry in the guidebook or registry' is a perfectly good definition for this purpose.

cheers for clues
 

kay

Well-known member
wookey said:
I did find that there are 182 caves >1km long and >60m deep in the UK + Ireland. I estimate that if you include all the poxy caves too we have something in the 1-2500 range?

The 3 Dales vols of NC have something over 1700 entries in their indexes (all 3 vols combined) (rough estimate based purely on column lengths - I did not count them all). I wouldn't have thought many were merely entrances, since it indexes by cave not by entrance, though there may be argument, for example, as to whether Browgill/Calf Holes is one cave or two. On the other hand there have been an awful lot of discoveries which haven't found their way into the published NC. So maybe more than 2500?
 

rhychydwr1

Active member
Mendip Cave Registry list 2200 caves.  I have only visited and listed 283 caves so far but I am working on it.
 

Bob Mehew

Well-known member
Indeterminate for both clubs and caves.  I recall some 200+ clubs as members of BCA but more do exist outside of that.  They do NOT have to be members and I recall of at least a few cases of clubs being members of regional caving councils but not BCA.

For caves, we did a quick assessment for CRoW in 2014 and found

Region               Total No. of Cave Entrances

Dales                         2543
Devon & Cornwall 40+
Mendip                 771 / 1379
Peak District         640
Wales (ex FoD)          518 / 1795
Forest of Dean      171

Values are estimates and known to have potentially sizable errors for regions other than the Dales.  Blank entries indicate no data available.  The table does not include all mines.  The data for the Dales and the Peak District has been taken from their guide books.  The first figure for Mendip comes from its guide book, the second from the cave registry which was used to identify entrances on access land.  (Not sure how it has expanded to over 2200 according to rhychydwr1 in under 3 years.)  The first figure for Wales comes from the guide book which only covers South Wales, the second from the cave registry for all of Wales which was used to identify entrances on access land.  The Forest of Dean figure includes mines.

 

mikem

Well-known member
Bob Mehew said:
Values are estimates and known to have potentially sizable errors for regions other than the Dales.  Blank entries indicate no data available.  The table does not include all mines.  The data for the Dales and the Peak District has been taken from their guide books.  The first figure for Mendip comes from its guide book, the second from the cave registry which was used to identify entrances on access land.  (Not sure how it has expanded to over 2200 according to rhychydwr1 in under 3 years.)
If you count the bibliography entries you will get quite a lot more than the registry as groupings of caves (e.g. Burrington) are also listed.

Mike
 

wookey

Active member
Any chance of keeping the CroW argument to the other 300 threads, so this one can just be about numbers of clubs and caves?

There will always be a few clubs joining leaving at any one time, for either practical or political reasons. It doesn't significantly affect the general issue of tallying numbers, beyond being useful confirmation that some clubs are real functioning clubs but not BCA members.

Cheers.
 

NewStuff

New member
I'm sure an admin or mod can split this thread at an appropriate point, as it's obvious from the replies that it is something that needs talking about in it's own thread.
 

MarkS

Moderator
NewStuff said:
I'm sure an admin or mod can split this thread at an appropriate point, as it's obvious from the replies that it is something that needs talking about in it's own thread.

[mod]Now split to a new topic.[/mod]
 

Jenny P

Active member
The Membership Administrator's report to BCA Council on Saturday 25 March 2017 reported:

DIMs - 533;  Groups - 151; CIMs  -  4513. 

(So a total of 5046 individual members and the "groups" category includes both clubs and "Access Controlling Bodies".)

This is almost certainly lower than the final total for 2017 will be as some clubs renew very late in the year.  (Which also means the number of CIMs will rise throughout the year as their clubs renew.)

If you want the figures for 2016 there is a detailed summary in the Membership Administrator's report to the AGM.  This actually gives the figures for each year since 2004 and includes some extra details on types of membership, e.g. caving and non-caving, etc. for 2016.  He reported that, as of 26th May 2016 there were 169 clubs, 2 associates and 8 Access Controlling Bodies.

 

Aubrey

Member
Interesting that over 5% of all BCA members are members of  the Wessex.
We must be doing something right compared to the other 150 clubs.

 

Jenny P

Active member
Aubrey said:
Interesting that over 5% of all BCA members are members of  the Wessex.
We must be doing something right compared to the other 150 clubs.

There is a slight difficulty here in that we don't know how many cavers who would otherwise be CIMs have actually taken the decision to become DIMs.  (For instance, in my club there are 6 DIMs and 2 who have their insurance via another club, so the number of CIMs doesn't match the number of members in the club.)  It also doesn't take account of those who are "Caving" members and those who are "Non-caving" members for the purposes of PL insurance.

I guess having the totals as supplied by the Membership Administrator is about as good as you'll get for Wookey's purposes.

Going on Bob's figures (and taking the higher figures for numbers of caves), that makes it about 1.07 cavers per cave. 

So there you are, if you spread around a bit you can each have a cave to yourself :)
 
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