Cave Access

Legal aspects of cave access

Visiting caves on private land is ultimately at the discretion of the landowner. Some landowners set up access arrangements with groups or individuals who then administer cave access on their behalf. In other cases there might be de facto unchallenged access, or at the opposite extreme in just a few places cave visitors may not be welcome at all. Most private landowners, both large and small, are reasonable and receptive to cave access requests. We wish to acknowledge their understanding, generosity and support. Link to Caving Wales Restricted Access Caves Page The Welsh Ministers rely on two bodies to protect natural and historic resources: Natural Resources Wales and Cadw. These organisations do not generally obstruct caving activities but NRW has raised legal questions over the statutory access rights of cavers. The concept of Access Land was created in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW) and the statutory recreational (i.e. non-commercial) access right therein is for ‘open-air recreation’, a term which the Act left undefined. The considered view of the British Caving Association, and with strong legal advice, is that that all members of the public do have the legal right to enter caves on Access Land for personal recreation. The Welsh Senedd did a consultation on extending CROW access rights during 2020 but it did not enact anything. The other law granting recreational access rights in England and Wales is the Law of Property Act 1925 (LPA) whose terminology is ‘air and exercise … on land’. The land it refers to is Urban Commons, that is commons situated in Urban District Council areas as distinct from Rural District Council areas in 1925. NRW has again challenged whether this right includes recreational caving, questioning the nuances of the words ‘on’ and ‘in’ and whether ‘land’ include caves. Despite holding meetings with senior NRW staff, and civil actions brought by cavers during the past 10 years, nothing definitive has been achieved to resolve our differences of opinion. Our Conservation and Access Officer, as at November 2025, expands on this below. The so-called right-to-roam is utilised mainly by walkers but it is applicable to all outdoor recreations that are not explicitly excluded by name in Schedule 2 of CROW or by location in Schedule 1. For example, swimming and cycling are excluded, as is land covered with buildings or railways. However, it is always possible to acquire explicit permission from specific landowners for activities on their land which disposes of any disagreement over the scope of statutory rights, what Access Land is, what open air is, what land is, and so on. As caves and caving are not excluded by Schedules 1 and 2 of CROW it is our opinion that the public do have a statutory right to go caving on Access Land. This view is not shared by NRW who claim that caving is not an ‘open-air recreation’. Thus NRW posits caving as another indoors activity such as ballroom dancing. NRW has other specious objections to caving, including that Access Land as it is indicated on OS or official maps does not depict cave passage outlines. OS does not mark many of the 2000+ Welsh cave entrances with labelled dots either. Our position is that the legal purpose of legal maps is just to define a land area in terms of a boundary line, as a property deed does. OS maps always omit considerable detail, for example unofficial footpaths and small rock outcrops. They have to give clarity to what can be shown in a small space to best serve their widest readership. The omission of fine detail does not mean that walkers or climbers or anyone else are excluded from using land features that are not explicitly drawn. NRW also claimed that Parliament selected the phrase ‘open-air recreation’ with care so as to ensure that CROW Act rights would not apply to caving by strict definition because caves generally have enclosed air. Parliament thus avoided the bother of having to exclude caving explicitly in the Schedules when it could easily have done that. NRW’s claim is delusive because Parliament never debated caving nor had any idea of excluding caving indirectly. The purpose of the main part of the CROW Act is to set out the broad principles and aims while the purpose of Schedules 1-2 is to list the specific exclusions unambiguously. NRW objected to caving in its court submissions on CROW citing the complexity of some cave rescues when no legislation excludes sports by risk factor, and all sports carry varying levels of risk at various times. As noted, NRW has also argued at great length over the semantics of the prepositions ‘in’ and ‘on’. It has also proposed that the altitude of cave entrances somehow affects cave access rights, and claimed that the underground natural world is more easily damaged by visitors than the surface natural world, and much more. However, NRW also likes to appear reasonable. In May 2020 its then internal solicitor suggested a mechanism for cavers to create a High Court case to obtain a ruling on NRW’s claims. But when a court case arrived, the BCA Judicial Review of 2020-21 which concerned the alleged unlawful exclusion of caving from the Senedd’s consultation on expanding CROW rights to sports it did not cover, NRW did everything it could for two years to prevent court hearings from going ahead. By this time the BCA had to draw a line under its legal costs. A recent recreational access dispute which ended at the Supreme Court is the Dartmoor Camping case. The judges involved in that ruled unanimously and in a general way that statutory turns of phrase like ‘open-air’ have to be interpreted broadly and cannot not used in a narrow or literal sense to reverse the intention of legislation. The Dartmoor landowners thus lost their case which argued, in the manner of NRW, that being enclosed inside a tent during a walking tour is not ‘open-air’ recreation because the tent has enclosed the walker, and that going to sleep in a tent or otherwise is not ‘recreation’ because the walker becomes unconscious. Had it been possible to pursue the caving case to the very end then it seems likely we would have obtained a ruling that entering a cave, or going to sleep inside a cave or anywhere else does not convert the open-air recreation into something else. NRW accepts that caving is a form of ‘air and exercise’ but NRW then claims that caves situated on urban common land are not part of the common so they do not fall within the ambit of the LPA for recreation. NRW is arguing for a two-dimensional interpretation of ‘land’ solely in the matter of recreation so as to exclude caving. This is even more tenuous than any of their objections to CROW because Section 205 of the LPA actually defines land three-dimensionally, explicitly including the strata, mines and everything else that is underneath the surface. The LPA is upholding the ancient ad coelum et ad infernos legal principle. Therefore it is incorrect and inconsistent, in our opinion, to accept that common land is three-dimensional concerning ownership and commoners’ rights but simultaneously to claim that only the surface of the land is available for recreation. In practical terms for cavers, experience shows that NRW finds ambiguity useful. They will not themselves nor allow others to bring a legal challenge against their views on cave access because they fear the courts. What seems more likely as their next challenge is using conservation legislation in a disproportionate or unintended way to suggest that going caving somehow damages nature when other pursuits do not. For example, NRW claimed as recently as 2024 that they may try to stop cavers from following a footpath to reach a cave entrance because cavers might damage some ferns whereas nowhere would NRW take such a stance against ramblers using a footpath. The ferns in question were not a protected species and they are common across the entire northern hemisphere according to Kew. The walker in the photo on the far left and the caver abseiling are both at the top of a cave on Access Land amongst ferns. NRW would say that the walker here is legal because walking is an open-air recreation but the caver is a trespasser for the opposite reason. The person in shorts in the middle photo is clearly a walker who is wearing a helmet and standing on Access Land just outside a cave entrance. Does possessing the helmet convert this walker into a caver? Does sheltering from heavy rain inside the cave entrance convert unlucky walkers into cavers and remove their access rights? Defra has seized upon exactly that. Defra has actually argued that open air means ‘being stood somewhere that you can be rained on’. Clearly the four people in the photo on the far right cannot be rained on because they are under a natural roof. But it also follows that you cannot be rained on stood under a large oak tree, at least for a while, but you can be rained on at the bottom of a pothole open to the sky, and potholes are caves. Therefore, by applying the rain principle, admiring an oak tree from a distance is always permitted by CROW but standing under the big tree to shelter from rain is not. Defra’s rain logic also implies that one can abseil into a pothole using statutory access rights, since rain would be a possibility, but not then head off horizontally from its floor which puts you beyond the reach of any rain. This is all just as bizarre as arguing over tents and going to sleep in the context of outdoor recreation, the complexity of being rescued, and your altitude above sea level. In conclusion, officialdom appears not to like caving. That has been made clear by its digressions into nature conservation and public safety and landowner perspectives on liability that emerged during court proceedings concerning nothing but statutory recreational access rights. The Dartmoor case ought to unsettle NRW, and threadbare arguments are best not put to proof. However, the current de facto truce in the statutory access rights disagreement with NRW is unlikely to be the end of legal road for cavers. Winning the access argument through precedents set by the Dartmoor case is unlikely to cause an outbreak of tolerance and goodwill any time soon. Public bodies may instead give up on challenging statutory access and find something else to advance the same agenda.