About Cave Access Limited

The company was set up to be the counterparty for two parallel recreational mine explorer access agreements made with Natural Resources Wales and the Welsh Ministers, both of which NRW unilaterally revoked in 2023. This was after they had run successfully without any issues or complaints being raised in the previous eight years by either side. Efforts were made by CAL and some willing NRW staff during 2023-24 to develop a replacement scheme, but this ended with NRW no longer replying to our correspondence. Possibly their people were made redundant along with hundreds more staffers in late 2024 due to a financial crisis within NRW erupting.

Prior to that point it had been proving impossible to get NRW even to understand that recreational mine exploring is an informal personal activity, like hill walking or caving by small groups of friends are, and that underground exploring is never a formal organised event like a forest motor rally attracting large numbers of spectators, advertised in advance and happening on a specific date with on-site supervision and facilities such as temporary car parks, toilets and litter bins being deployed and later removed during a clean-up phase.

As NRW were fixated on the idea of recreational mine exploring on forestry land being treated as a forest motor rally event would be, and the people who had suggested this inappropriate idea to us had vanished, the CAL directors decided that it was pointless to resume our own efforts, essentially starting again from the ground up, and so instead the process began in 2025 to remove the company from the register.