Lidar Map UK is a simple way to explore the shape of Britain in extraordinary detail. It is a map for people who want to look past roads and labels and see the deeper structure of the land itself: ridges, scarps, terraces, embankments, floodplains, ancient earthworks, and the subtle contours that have always helped shape where people travelled, settled, farmed, and built.

It is also a celebration of the incredible technology of LiDAR. There is something irresistible about the whole idea: aircraft flying survey lines over the country, firing pulses of laser light at the ground and measuring their return so precisely that the hidden form of the landscape can be reconstructed from the results.

LiDAR, short for light detection and ranging, works by sending pulses of laser light down from an aircraft and measuring how long they take to return. Because light travels absurdly fast, even tiny differences in travel time correspond to real differences in height and distance on the ground. The method depends on timing of astonishing precision, building up a dense cloud of measurements from which a detailed model of the landscape can be derived.

That is part of what makes lidar so charming as a technology. It feels faintly implausible yet it is entirely real: lasers from planes, incredibly precise clocks, millions upon millions of returns, and from that an image of the country stripped back to form and relief.

One of the most magical things about lidar is what happens in woodland. Many pulses bounce off the canopy itself, or off branches and undergrowth, but some lucky beams find gaps between the leaves, strike the ground beneath, and return to the sensor. Gather enough of those elusive returns and the terrain hidden under dense tree cover begins to emerge.

That can reveal the underlying shape of a slope, a bank, a terrace, a ditch, or the ghost of a long-abandoned feature that is almost impossible to read from ordinary aerial photography alone. In heavily wooded parts of the country, lidar often feels less like a different map and more like a different sense.

This site lets you switch between two common lidar-derived views. DSM stands for Digital Surface Model. It includes the surfaces that the laser encounters first, so buildings, trees, and other above-ground features remain part of the picture. DTM stands for Digital Terrain Model. It attempts to strip those away and show the underlying land itself.

In practice, DSM is useful for understanding the present-day surface of the landscape, while DTM is often the better choice when you want to study landform, pick out subtle earthworks, or get a cleaner sense of the terrain. Switching between the two is often the quickest way to understand what you are actually looking at.

The map combines public lidar datasets from England and Wales, along with standard web map tiles for context. In England, the lidar used here is shown at 1 metre resolution. Roughly speaking, that means each pixel corresponds to a 1 metre square on the ground, which is fine enough to show a remarkable amount of texture and subtle relief.

Wales also has 1 metre lidar in places, but that coverage is comparatively patchy. To keep the map more continuous and useful across the country, Lidar Map UK defaults to 2 metre data in Wales and only enables switching to 1 metre at higher zoom levels, where the extra detail is most helpful and the gaps are easier to work around.

The lidar itself comes from public data published by the Environment Agency for England and by Natural Resources Wales for Wales. The base map uses OpenStreetMap tiles. Because these sources differ, you will sometimes notice changes in coverage, texture, or visual character as you move across boundaries.

The split controls let you compare lidar directly against the base map, either vertically or horizontally, and you can drag the divider to focus on exactly the area you want. Clicking the active split again flips which side gets the lidar, and the lidar-only mode removes the base map altogether so you can read the terrain without distraction.

Use the DTM and DSM buttons to switch between bare terrain and surface form. In Wales, resolution controls appear in more detailed views so you can compare 1 metre and 2 metre coverage where that makes sense. The search button will jump you straight to a town, landmark, or postcode. On touch devices, the split divider can be dragged directly with your finger.

Lidar is at its best when you start using it not just to find places, but to read the country. River valleys stand out as channels cut deep into the land. Escarpments and folds become more obvious. Dry valleys, terraces, floodplains, old routeways, quarrying, embankments, and the relationship between settlement and topography all begin to make much more sense when you can see the ground itself clearly.

It is also an extraordinary way to explore Britain's long human story in the landscape: hillforts on commanding ridges, ancient earthworks hidden in pasture, ridge-and-furrow in old farmland, field boundaries that outlasted the lives that made them, and subtle traces that are easy to miss until lidar makes them legible. The pleasure of the map is partly in finding famous places, but just as much in noticing forms you did not set out to look for.

Lidar has transformed landscape archaeology because it helps bring overlooked features to light. It can make the shape of enclosures, banks, ditches, platforms, hollow ways, and other traces far easier to notice, especially where vegetation or modern land use obscures them in more ordinary views.

People exploring lidar have occasionally been the first to notice features that turned out to be genuinely unknown - a ring ditch in a field, a hollow way through woodland, the outline of a lost building. It does happen, and it is one of the quiet thrills of spending time with this kind of data.

This site is not a formal archaeological tool, but it is absolutely a place to cultivate that habit of looking carefully. The more time you spend with lidar, the more the land starts to reveal patterns, and the more you appreciate just how much of Britain's story is still written in the ground beneath our feet.

Lidar Map UK is built with data and tools from the following sources:

England lidar data — © Environment Agency. Hillshade tiles served via environment.data.gov.uk. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Wales lidar data — © Natural Resources Wales. Hillshade tiles served via DataMapWales. Contains Natural Resources Wales information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Base map tiles — © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence.

Satellite tiles — © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community.

Location search — powered by Nominatim, using OpenStreetMap data.

Mapping library — Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library by Volodymyr Agafonkin.