Total length of cave passage in the UK?

[Mike Butch]

Assessing the total amount of cave in a country is a bit tricky, but does anyone know the total length of surveyed cave passage in the UK? Or could direct me to a source of such information?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[rhychydwr1]

Easy.  Just buy every cave guide book and add up the lengths.  Perhaps I can help.  I have a few I want to sell 

 

[cavermark]

This would be an interesting statistic - It might only be ball park though.

I guess you might need to consult area experts and do some adding up (eg. Badlad for 3 counties, Moose for Castleton, maybe area guidebook writers etc.)

Don't forget Scotland..

Caverbob has figures for the longer systems worldwide http://www.caverbob.com/wlong.htm

 

[Badlad]

This is fairly subjective depending what you include and don't include but whilst researching total numbers of caves I was supplied with the following figures and best guesses.

450 Northern area (Dales)
309 Cambrian
100 Peak
80  Mendips
38  N. Ireland
30  Forest of Dean
20  Scotland
2    Devon

1029km +/- 10% should be somewhere near.

 

[braveduck]

Yes but how much unexplored passage is still to find ?
We get asked this regularly on the GG open meet .
It would be nice to know so we could give the public an answer !

 

[paul]

Yes but how much unexplored passage is still to find ?
We get asked this regularly on the GG open meet .
It would be nice to know so we could give the public an answer !

How about "All of it!" as an answer?

 

[tamarmole]

This is fairly subjective depending what you include and don't include but whilst researching total numbers of caves I was supplied with the following figures and best guesses.

450 Northern area (Dales)
309 Cambrian
100 Peak
80  Mendips
38  N. Ireland
30  Forest of Dean
20  Scotland
2    Devon

1029km +/- 10% should be somewhere near.

What about the North York Moors or is this lumped in with the Dales?

 

[Blakethwaite]

At about two miles or so it will fall well within the +/- 10% I think...

 

[JJ]

1029km +/- 10% should be somewhere near.

http://www.caverbob.com/wlong.htm

Wow it is depressing to read that Mammoth Cave in the US has over six times the amount of cave passage as the whole of the UK!

 

[cavermark]

Wow it is depressing to read that Mammoth Cave in the US has over six times the amount of cave passage as the whole of the UK!

You've confused your decimal point - Mammoth is 643km - so only six tenths the amount of UK cave.

..and it's all about quality not quantity in the UK! 

 

[cavermark]

This is fairly subjective depending what you include and don't include but whilst researching total numbers of caves I was supplied with the following figures and best guesses.

450 Northern area (Dales)
309 Cambrian
100 Peak
80  Mendips
38  N. Ireland
30  Forest of Dean
20  Scotland
2    Devon

1029km +/- 10% should be somewhere near.

Thanks Badlad
Any chance of a caverbob style league table for the UK somewhere on the forum??  It could have a section for newly surveyed passage each year too perhaps...

 

[Antwan]

Write a wiki article mark?

 

[Les W]

The figure you have for Devon is wrong anyway as Bakers Pit is claimed to be around 3.5km and then there are all the other caves in Devon as well (both of them...  :tease: )

 

[Robert Scott]

Wow it is depressing to read that Mammoth Cave in the US has over six times the amount of cave passage as the whole of the UK!

You've confused your decimal point - Mammoth is 643km - so only six tenths the amount of UK cave.

..and it's all about quality not quantity in the UK! 

Birks Fell is "worth all England else"

 

[Pitlamp]

Wow it is depressing to read that Mammoth Cave in the US has over six times the amount of cave passage as the whole of the UK!

You've confused your decimal point - Mammoth is 643km - so only six tenths the amount of UK cave.

..and it's all about quality not quantity in the UK! 

Birks Fell is "worth all England else"

You're absolutely right there Mr.S; it's one of the finest potholes in the universe.

To try to help the O.P - it might be worth talking to Nick Williams. He played a major role in sorting out the present BCA insurance. When we were all panicking about this the insurers asked about how much cave passage is known in the UK. Each region of the UK got a team of experienced cavers together to do the calculations. Wasn't there an article in Descent about this around the time? Descent has a good searchable database, so it might be worth a browse there, to get a quotable reference?

 

[JJ]

Quote from: JJ on Today at 06:14:46 pm

Wow it is depressing to read that Mammoth Cave in the US has over six times the amount of cave passage as the whole of the UK!

You've confused your decimal point - Mammoth is 643km - so only six tenths the amount of UK cave.

..and it's all about quality not quantity in the UK! 

Whoops  :-[ my apologies. I knew it didn't sound right.

 

[Badlad]

A bit of deja vous.  From a few years ago

Yes, I think it was in Descent. If it's the one I'm thinking of, that was done in the wake of having to work out the total lengths of cave passage in each region for the BCA insurers (with Nick Williams in charge I think). It's well over 10 years ago and probably quite a bit longer but I seem to remember that (then) there was around 500 miles of passage in the Dales, in total. Descent has a very good search thingy on its website so I'm sure if someone wanted the reference it could be found without too much difficulty.

The best reply was this;

The article Pitlamp mentioned was called 'Our Caving Capacity' and appeared in Descent 167 (Aug/Sep 2002). The cave regions and aggregate lengths (in km) given were (excluding Scotland, 18):
  Yorkshire Dales 385
  South Wales 289
  Peak District  98
  Mendip 40
  Forest of Dean 30
  North Wales 14
  Devon 1

About 10 years ago I went through guide books to compile data from which I have extracted this list of numbers of cave entrances  (excluding Scotland, 806):
  Northern England 1878
  South Wales 940
  Derbyshire 234
  Mendip 233
  Other England & Wales 153
  Devon 137
  North Wales 70

and an updated version of this is;

This is fairly subjective depending what you include and don't include but whilst researching total numbers of caves I was supplied with the following figures and best guesses.

450 Northern area (Dales)
309 Cambrian
100 Peak
80  Mendips
38  N. Ireland
30  Forest of Dean
20  Scotland
2    Devon

1029km +/- 10% should be somewhere near.

Although clearly there is room for improvement on this data too.

 

[rhychydwr1]

Mendip Cave Registry [Kopieren Verboten!] list 2200 caves.

 

[tim.rose2]

And of course Portland is always forgotten! 

I've just added up what I reckon currently exists on the island (excluding sea caves) from the Portland book which gives a total of about 3.3 km.  I'm sure someone who has been involved in surveying Portland in the past could give a more accurate number.

 

[McMole]

The estimate for Scotland of 20km could be reasonable for surveyed passage. I've just had a quick look through the cave guides published by the GSG, counted the number of cave surveys, added in discoveries of the last few years where I know surveys  have appeared in the GSG Bulletins and got a total of 168 surveys with about 15 km of passage. This is going to be an underestimate as I know of many other caves that have been surveyed, but I don't have time to go through the last 50 years of GSG publications to count them all. There are also a very large number that haven't been surveyed - most of the thousands of sea caves. My five year old copy of the GSG cave and mine database listed 1530 sites of which 801 were natural caves. Of these 276 had a quoted length and they summed to 14.4 km. I hear the database has now expanded to over 4000 entries, but don't know how many are natural cavities or been surveyed.