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General Info 2025

This page is mostly concerned with reporting the Competition Results and Conference Team Credits but, added here, are any other snippets of info about HE 2025 that have been collected.

We think this was a record attendance. There were 996 delegate days booked in advance, and 368 delegate days arrived over the weekend. So an average of 680 people present each day.

Competition Results 2025

Editors, etc, please see Data for Staff Use at foot of page.

Prize Winners

Merits and Distinctions

For the Salons we award Merits and Distinction as well as an outright winner.

* YP – Young Photographer. The YP section of the photo salon is judged separately and has its own prizes. However, all the photos are automatically entered into the main competition and, should they be awarded a merit or distinction, they receive an additional prize for being in the YP class.

* Certificates. We usually announce that certificates will be sent to winners of the Salon competitions but, due to a lack of volunteer effort, this has not happened in recent years. We are hoping to be able to rectify this in the aftermath of Hidden Earth 2025.

Sponsors

Competition Prizes

Sponsors of competition prizes are listed in the tables above, and summarised in the list below. [This list is automatically extracted from the data source for the above tables. Note that the prize counts, in brackets, are a debugging aid and are not intended for general reporting].

Action Stash (1)
British Cave Research Association (2)
Cave Diving Group (1)
Ceris Jones artwork (4)
Descent (4)
Go Below (1)
Grampian Speleology Group (1)
Handknitted Pottery (1)
Hidden Earth (3)
Inglesport (1)
Julie Jones (1)
Leica (2)
Mark Wright Training (1)
Robin Gray (2)
SpanSet (1)
Starless River (2)
UK Caving (5)
Warmbac (11)
Wild Places Publishing (3)
caving club bednights (9)

Caving Club Bednights

There were many donations of bed-nights by caving clubs this year. We thank them all for their support, which provides opportunities for cavers to meet other cavers across the country. This year the bednight winners got to choose from the range of donations, enabling them to visit a club hut in the caving region of their choice. Bednights were donated by ...

• Bradford Pothole Club
• Bristol Exploration Club
• Chelsea Spelaeological Society
• Craven Pothole Club
• Grampian Speleological Group
• Nenthead Mines Conservation Society
• Orpheus Caving Club
• Shepton Mallet Caving Club
• South Wales Caving Club
• Technical Speleological Group
• Wessex Cave Club

Other Prizes

Badge Draw

We ask everyone to return their badges, so we can re-use them next year. The winner, drawn out of the box and announced at the closing ceremony was Harley Bennett who wins free entry to next year's Hidden Earth.

Scurion / Starless River Raffle

We raffled an LED lamp donated by Scurion, together with a helmet, provided by Starless River, with the proceeds of £500 going to North Wales Cave Rescue Organisation. The winner was Gaz Stonely.

Judges' Remarks on the Competitions

Art Salon

Judges feedback: A great variety, with lots of skill and thought, and enjoyable to judge

Photo Salon

This year, we decided to keep to the simplified structure of the Photo Salon that we have used since 2023. We awarded the Premier Trophy for the best portfolio of five images, and we awarded one prize in the print and projection classes; as well as merits and distinctions. (The traditional monochrome and colour print classes were, once again, merged into one).

This year, we once again ran our new competition for Young Photographers, defined as being under 22 years of age on the day of the competition. This competition used a separate organising team, with separate judges, and the team sought their own cash sponsorship for the additional prizes. The proviso was that the competition entries all had to be entered in the main photo salon as well, and had to use the main salon display boards. This worked well, and seemed a good way to balance the available volunteer effort with the presentation of a 'seamless' competition.

Once again, there was no Cave Life or Cave Science category. Additional competition categories such as these make the organisation much more difficult, all the way from the entry form, through to organising the labelling of the displays, the judging and the prize allocation. Our current view is that if there is a demand for additional special categories such as Cave Life or Cave Science than someone must step forward to organise the category along similar lines to the our Young Photographer category, that is, they must provide a team to do it.

Survey Salon

Video Media Salon

Coordinator's feedback: The overall quality was very good. Our Judging system has been refined slightly from last year and it worked extremely well this time around. For next year we are moving over to a Goggle Forms Document for both the judging and the master score sheets.

Best Club Stand

Judges feedback: We were impressed with the interactive components, and the high quality of the photos and surveys, which were displayed well. The people on hand were helpful and full of information.

National Awards

Fraser Simpson Award for Innovation in video

This annual award is given by the Hidden Earth Team for recognition of excellence in underground video creation. Nominations, with reasons and examples of work are welcomed by the Hidden Earth conference manager in advance of the event. The work does not have to feature in the Video Salon. The award consists of a prize of £100, donated by Hidden Earth, and an engraved stone to keep for a year. Further information is at hidden.earth/salons/video/.

Fraser Simpson died in 2017. He was an audio-visual technical expert at Fife College, an accomplished caver and a key member of Grampian Speleological Group. Fraser was also a valued member of the Hidden Earth team, due to his extensive AV knowledge and expertise. His film-making skills were considerable and the Hidden Earth Team and BCRA Council have agreed to set up an annual award to commemorate him and his contributions. The criteria for the award sits in innovation and excellence within the world of speleological video.

2025 Award

Over the last two years a significant cave discovery has transformed a caving area with reports of extensive passages and beautiful formations. A vast amount of work has been recorded, as it happened, 'warts and all'. The judges were impressed by this innovative approach of serialising the discoveries in Redhouse Swallet and quickly reporting them to the wider world – something that has not done before on this scale, as far as the judges are aware. There have been 20 episodes so far, and exploration continues.

Thus, for 2025 the Frazer Simpson award is given to Ian Healey for his work on the Redhouse Swallet project and his video Redhouse - One Year On, which also won this year's Video Salon.

BCRA's Arthur Butcher Award

BCRA's Tratman Award

Giles Barker Award

Further Photos

Conference Team Credits

Conference Manager — LES WILLIAMS

Technical Team: Manager — FRANK TULLY

Trade Hall Team: Manager — BADGER

Reception Team: Manager — LOU BIFFIN

Events Team

Bookings and Publicity Team

Competitions Team: Manager — DAVID GIBSON

Sponsorship and Prizes Team — MARGARET RICHARDSON

First Aid Team — CHRIS WILLIAMS

Special thanks to — PAFILIWN LLANGOLLEN PAVILION

Thanks also to the lecturers and the session chairs, and also to the traders, sponsors, and to all delegates from the UK and overseas, who all contributed to making the event a success

Data for Staff Use

Some parts of this page are generated from data files, which you can also access. However, please note that the data might contain unused columns or strange notes that do not appear to make sense; or strange delimiters for some of the data. It might not be any more use that what you can get by pasting the HTML tables into Textpad (or similar) to cleanse them of markup.

You can access the Competition Results as tab-separated data, and the staff credits as plain text in the form of a PHP program.

Reminders to Self

• Reminder to self: Competition Results file, named winners.20**.txp, is generated from write_data_array, which will only run at localhost.
• Reminder to self: staff credits PHP file does not require any processing as it used directly.
• Reminder to self: The Arthur Butcher Award and Premier Trophy pages on the BCRA website need manually updating to match the data given here, and dont forget to ad the engraving info.
• Reminder to self: Also see 3rd party info on Tratman Award and Giles Barker Award pages.

British Cave Research Association (UK registered charity 267828) and British Caving Association.
The Old Methodist Chapel, Great Hucklow, BUXTON, SK17 8RG
This page, http://forms.hidden.earth/he/history/winners.2025.html was last modified on Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:09:15 +0000
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