LiDAR maps for metal detecting in England

Last updated: 9 September 2026

A LiDAR map shows the landscape as it looks with the trees, hedges and buildings taken away — just the bare earth. For a detectorist it's one of the most powerful ways to read the ground: barrows, ridge and furrow and lost villages that are invisible on an ordinary aerial photo stand out clearly in the raking light. England has free LiDAR covering nearly all of the country, and this is how to use it — what it shows, what it can't, and how to skip the download-and-GIS faff.

What is a LiDAR map?

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a survey in which an aircraft fires millions of laser pulses at the ground and times how long each takes to return. From that you build a dense elevation model. Keep only the pulses that reached the ground itself — stripping out trees, hedges and buildings — and you're left with the bare earth: a Digital Terrain Model, the land on its own.

A hillshade lights that model from a low angle, so every small ridge and hollow casts a shadow. It's that combination — bare earth plus raking light — that makes human-made traces in the landscape visible, including ones you'd walk straight past in the field.

What LiDAR reveals in the English landscape

England's fields are layered with earthworks, and a bare-earth hillshade brings them out:

• Round barrows — Bronze Age burial mounds, often ploughed almost flat, still leave a low round rise the shading catches.
• Ridge and furrow — the corrugated pattern of medieval open-field ploughing, telling you where the medieval fields lay.
• Deserted medieval villages — abandoned settlements survive as earthwork house platforms, tofts and hollow streets.
• Hollow ways — old, worn-down routes read as sunken grooves running through the terrain.
• Hillforts, enclosures and field systems — banks, ditches and boundaries from the Iron Age onward.

Not everything is ancient — land drains, modern plough lines and forestry tracks show up too. But the eye learns to tell them apart quickly, and a shape worth walking to is often only visible here.

How to read a bare-earth hillshade

The shading is lit from one direction — usually the north-west — so features stand out best when they run across the light. A few habits help:

• Look for regular geometry: circles, straight banks, right angles and repeating ridges are usually human, not natural.
• Watch the scale: a round barrow is metres across, ridge and furrow is a repeating corrugation, a hollow way is a long groove. Learning the sizes tells you what you're looking at.
• Remember its limits: under dense evergreen canopy or in built-up areas the bare-earth model is less reliable, and a hillshade can hide a feature that happens to run along the light. When in doubt, compare with the aerial photo or a hillshade lit from a different direction.
• Most of all: LiDAR shows the shape of the ground, not metal. It tells you where people shaped the land — it is a research layer, not a target finder.

LiDAR map or aerial photo?

An aerial photo shows the surface: crops, grass and tree canopy. A LiDAR map shows the ground beneath. The biggest difference is woodland — where the aerial photo stops at the canopy, some laser pulses find their way between the leaves to the forest floor, so ground that looks like impenetrable scrub from above can reveal earthworks on LiDAR. The two are strongest together: the aerial photo for what's on the ground now, LiDAR for what lies in it. Both sit alongside historic maps in the same planning workflow.

England's national LiDAR — the official data

The LiDAR in Muld isn't a third-party service. It's the Environment Agency's national LiDAR — the bare-earth composite Digital Terrain Model, which brings the National LiDAR Programme together with earlier airborne surveys to cover nearly all of England. It's the same open data used by archaeologists and planners, published under the Open Government Licence. Muld renders the hillshade directly on the map, carrying the required attribution — © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right — so you don't have to download large tiles or learn a GIS program.

LiDAR terrain in Muld

Anyone can download raw Environment Agency LiDAR, but turning it into a readable hillshade means wrestling gigabytes of tiles through desktop GIS software — the step that stops most detectorists using it. In Muld, LiDAR is simply a layer you switch on over the map: the bare-earth hillshade, ready to pan and zoom in the field. You can combine it with the historic maps and the scheduled-monument overlay, so you see both the traces in the terrain and where you're allowed to go. LiDAR terrain is part of Muld+.

Official sources

This page is a plain-language introduction — not a technical manual. If you want to go deeper into the data, go to the official source.