Welcome to CNCC's Cavemaps.uk
For nearly 20 years, CaveMaps has been the go-to website for online cave surveys across our region. This was the brainchild of Andy Powell, who built the original site and populated it with thousands of survey images.
In 2010, Andy won the Arthur Butcher Award to recognise such a significant contribution to cave surveying. Andy evolved the site to bring in new ways of displaying surveys such as ‘DeepZoom’, but as time progressed, keeping the site running got harder. Any web developer will tell you that keeping up with modern web design standards and security requirements is a tough job.
At the start of this year, Andy approached CNCC to ask whether we would be interested in taking on CaveMaps to ensure its continuation. We were honoured to be asked and, after some initial very encouraging discussions, delighted to accept.
This is possible because our Web Administrator, Gary, is a professional web developer who works for CNCC on a voluntary basis. Since January, Gary has been building a new CaveMaps site from-scratch, taking inspiration from the original (including the colour theme, the cave categorisation by ‘Northern Caves’ areas, and other features).
As part of bringing CaveMaps into the CNCC, we wanted to tie the new database of cave surveys to our existing cave database, to allow click-through from the CNCC website to surveys for that cave. This functionality is also now live.
A huge part of the work involved transferring the data, assigning surveys to specific caves and entering information such as publisher, publication and year. We were able to use AI to extract this from the original database, and from text on the surveys themselves, but every single image needed to be checked and in many cases corrected.
Another important new functionality has been a user-friendly way for individuals to upload new surveys to the website, and the ability of moderators to easily manage the day to day running of the website and updates to content via a user-friendly, non-techy admin area.
The way surveys are displayed, searched and downloaded has been improved. DeepZoom has been extended to include some of the most detailed and highest resolution surveys. The new site is fully mobile-device compatible and should work on all modern browsers.
On the previous site, there were a number of entries shown only as low-resolution thumbnails. This is because permission to upload the full version has not been obtained. We have retained these on the new site, but they are referred to as ‘references’. They are useful to help direct cavers to original sources e.g. via the British Caving Library. However, our feedback was that these were annoying for most users who simply wanted to see full online content, so they are now excluded from searches by default, but can be included by checking a box.
As part of the update, hundreds more surveys have been added, including the entire Moldywarps Speleo Group catalogue, with thanks to MSG and Chris Curry, and in the coming days the Ease Gill Caverns survey sheets will be added courtesy of Red Rose Cave and Pothole Club (except Sheet 5 for the Pippikin area, which is still in-print).
The new site is now live: cavemaps.uk
The original site (cavemaps.org) directs to the new site but this domain will eventually be retired.
We’d like to thank Andy for his commitment to creating CaveMaps, and for supporting a handover to ensure continuity. It must be hard to let go, and we are honoured to be trusted with this. We’d also like to thank the various contributors and admins (past, present and future) and Gary, who has spent well over 100 hours building the new site.
Which brings us onto our final very important point…
We’d love to expand the library. If you are the publisher of a survey that is not on the site and you would like to make it available, please use the new ‘submit a survey’ function, or if that proves problematic, email us (see below) to discuss. Original digital images, or good quality scans of paper surveys are required please.
If you spot any issues or have any suggestions, please email cavemaps@cncc.org.uk