Free LiDAR map of England and Wales

What the map shows

LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is a laser survey flown from an aircraft. The scanner records millions of points on the ground and on everything standing on it. The points are then classified and only those on the ground surface are kept, which gives a digital terrain model (DTM): the shape of the ground with trees, crops and buildings removed.

The surveys were flown for the Environment Agency in England and for Natural Resources Wales and the Welsh Government in Wales, and are published under the Open Government Licence at one metre per pixel. On that model, earthworks show as height: the ramparts of a hillfort, a round barrow, the bank of a Roman road, the house platforms of a deserted village, or medieval ridge and furrow under a modern field.

The readings in the app

Most LiDAR viewers show one fixed hillshade image. Waystone loads the heights themselves and draws the picture in your browser with the RVT toolbox: the seventeen methods of the Relief Visualization Toolbox (ZRC SAZU), each with its own settings, starting at the toolbox's published defaults. The map opens on Combined VAT. Among the others:

• Hillshade, from one sun or from three directions. You choose the direction and height of the light, because a bank that runs towards the light casts no shadow.
• Simple and multi-scale local relief models: the broad shape of the hill is subtracted, so only the smaller features remain: banks, ditches, lynchets.
• Sky-view factor and openness: how much of the sky each point can see, which picks out ditches and hollows whatever the light.
• VAT and Combined VAT: the Visualisation for Archaeological Topography, which blends hillshading, slope, openness and sky-view factor into one picture.
• Local dominance, sky illumination, prismatic openness and the MSTP family, for when one reading hides what another shows.
• LiDAR over satellite: the relief laid over the photograph, so you can see which features are modern (a hedge, a track) and which are earthworks.

The guides explain each reading: how to read a LiDAR map, hillshade, SLRM, sky-view factor and VAT explained and what archaeology looks like on LiDAR.

What else is on the map

• Around 850,000 recorded places from the national heritage records: Historic England, Cadw, Coflein, Historic Environment Scotland, the National Monuments Service of Ireland and others.
• The Roman road network compiled by the Roman Roads Research Association, with each road's grade of evidence.
• The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, first and second editions, surveyed 1843–1913, from the National Library of Scotland.
• Historic England's aerial archaeology mapping.

LiDAR maps by area

Places to start

Questions

Is there a free LiDAR map of the UK?

Yes. Waystone shows the 1 m bare-earth LiDAR of all of England and Wales free in a web browser, drawn live by the RVT toolbox, with nothing to install or download. Search a place or a postcode, or open the map and zoom in anywhere.

Is the Waystone LiDAR map free?

Yes. The web app is free to use in a browser, with nothing to install.

Which areas does the LiDAR cover?

England and Wales. The recorded historic places and the old Ordnance Survey maps cover Britain and Ireland, but there is no bare-earth LiDAR in Waystone outside England and Wales.

What resolution is the LiDAR?

The source surveys are gridded at one metre per pixel.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Every place and parish page works on a phone, and its live LiDAR view runs Waystone’s renderer on the phone. The full map, with every layer and tool, is built for a laptop or desktop browser.

Can I download the LiDAR data?

Waystone shows the data; it does not redistribute the files. The source data for England can be downloaded from the Defra Survey Data Download service, and for Wales from DataMap Wales, both under the Open Government Licence.

Does LiDAR show archaeology?

It shows the shape of the ground, which includes earthworks such as ramparts, barrows, banks, ditches, hollow ways and old field systems. It does not date a feature or say what it is: that needs the heritage record, old maps and, in the end, fieldwork.