There are more than 450 artificial caves excavated from sandstone beneath the streets and buildings of Nottingham, England — including, legendarily, the old dungeon that once held Robin Hood. Not all of these caves are known even today, let alone mapped or studied.
The city sits atop a labyrinth of human-carved spaces — some of them huge — and it will quite simply never be certain if archaeologists and historians have found them all Laser scans courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey show Castle Rock and the Mortimer’s Hole tunnel, including, in the bottom image, the Trip to Jerusalem Pub where we met archaeologist David Strange-Walker; images like this imply an exhilarating and almost psychedelic portrait of the city, invisibly connected behind the scenes by an umbilical network of caves and tunnels.
I had the pleasure last summer of tagging along with archaeologist David Strange-Walker of the Nottingham Caves Survey to learn more about the organisation’s ambitious subterranean laser-scanning project, visiting many of the caves in person.The purpose of the Nottingham Caves Survey, as their website explains, is “to assess the archaeological importance of Nottingham’s caves. Some are currently scheduled monuments and are of great local and national importance. Some are pub cellars and may seem less vital to the history of the City.” Others, I was soon to learn, have been bricked off, taken apart, filled in, or forgotten.“All caves that can be physically accessed will be surveyed with a 3D laser scanner,” the Survey adds, “producing a full measured record of the caves in three dimensions. This ‘point cloud’ of millions of individual survey points can be cut and sliced into plans and sections, ‘flown through’ in short videos, and examined in great detail on the web.”