Overground-Underground Ingleborough Caving Project Report

Professor Rick Peterson, UCLAN (Centre),  with YDNP Historic Environment Team ground truthing a cave site on Ingleborough

The southern (Craven) Yorkshire Dales, in which Ingleborough Common sits, contains a classic example of Karst landscape, and England’s largest and most famous cave resource.  There is active exploration of this underground landscape by the caving community, as well as much recreational use of caves in the Ingleborough area. Cavers liaising with local Natural England staff and through networks such as the BCRA Cave Archaeology Group, have reported finds of animal bones from species such as red deer, wild boar, wolf and aurochs from a number of newly opened vertical cave shafts. Find reported in this way range in date from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Early Medieval period with particular concentrations in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Iron Age and Romano-British periods. They are of very high archaeological and palaeoenvironmental significance. The Centre for Field Archaeology and Forensic Taphonomy at the University of Central Lancashire was commissioned to carry out a project assessing this material (Peterson 2023)