Terms & Conditions

These Terms apply to the use of Buried Beneath Vault, a digital service operated by Buried Beneath LTD. They apply to the website/app, memberships, credit packs, Find Identification, My Vault, Land Intelligence, reports, maps, navigation tools and related features.

By creating an account, purchasing a membership or credits, or using a paid feature, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, you should not purchase or use the paid service.

Buried Beneath Vault is a product/trading style of Buried Beneath LTD. Your contract is with Buried Beneath LTD.

Buried Beneath Vault provides technology-assisted historical research tools. It may combine user-supplied photographs or locations with artificial intelligence, web research, mapping, LiDAR, historic maps, public datasets and deterministic scoring.

Outputs are research aids. They are not guarantees of identity, age, authenticity, value, archaeology, ownership, legal status, land access, the presence of finds, or the presence of Treasure.

Buried Beneath Vault accounts and paid memberships are for adults. You must be 18 or over to open a Vault account, buy a membership or buy credits. We do not ask for your date of birth; you confirm your age when you create an account. (This applies to Buried Beneath Vault only.)

You must provide accurate account information and keep your sign-in credentials secure. You are responsible for activity carried out through your account unless caused by our failure to use reasonable care.

You must not attempt to bypass credit controls, access another user's private material, probe security controls, misuse APIs, scrape the service at scale, or upload unlawful material.

Membership is offered at the price and with the allowance shown at checkout. At Final Copy v1.5, the standard membership is £9.99 per month and includes 6 Find credits and 4 Land credits per monthly billing period. The checkout screen and account page are authoritative if the commercial package is changed before purchase.

Membership renews automatically until cancelled. The Membership page shows status, start date, next renewal date and, where relevant, the date on which access will end.

Cancelling stops future renewal. Unless a statutory cancellation right (see clause 16) or refund remedy applies, cancellation does not normally end access immediately: paid membership access continues until the end of the current paid period.

Where the service allows it, a cancellation scheduled for period end may be resumed before access ends.

A Find credit permits one Find Identification workflow; a Land credit permits one Land Intelligence workflow, subject to the feature's current requirements.

Subscription credits are used before separately purchased credits. Subscription credits may roll over only up to the caps shown in the account at the time; at Final Copy v1.5 the caps are 12 Find credits and 8 Land credits. A renewal never raises a subscription balance above those caps.

Purchased credits are separate from subscription credits and are retained in the account subject to these Terms, account closure, applicable law and any clearly disclosed expiry rule at purchase.

Credits have no cash value and cannot be transferred between users unless we expressly provide that feature.

The system may reserve a credit when analysis starts. A reserved credit is consumed when the requested analysis is successfully delivered. If the workflow fails before delivery because of a technical failure, the reserved credit should be released back to the appropriate balance.

Find Identification analyses the photographs and information you provide. Results may include a suggested object type, date or period, ruler or authority, mint, observed features, historical context, confidence assessment, condition commentary, sources and an approximate market-value range.

Identification from photographs has inherent limitations. Wear, corrosion, lighting, scale, image quality, missing weight or diameter, unusual variants and counterfeit or altered objects can materially affect the result.

Buried Beneath Vault does not certify authenticity and does not replace physical examination by a suitably qualified archaeologist, numismatist, museum professional, auction specialist or other expert.

Any monetary figure or range is an indicative research estimate only. It is not a professional, auction, insurance, probate or certified valuation and is not a guarantee of a sale price.

Actual value may differ materially because of authenticity, condition, rarity, provenance, demand, market timing, fees and characteristics that cannot be reliably established from photographs alone.

Do not make significant financial, insurance or disposal decisions solely from a Buried Beneath Vault valuation.

Land Intelligence may combine current mapping, LiDAR, historic mapping, documentary or public evidence, AI-assisted research and deterministic spatial analysis.

Landscape Interest Scores, Target Intelligence rankings and labels such as Strong or Investigate express the strength and combination of available evidence. They do not predict that an archaeological object, valuable item or Treasure will be found.

Interpretations of former routes, settlement activity, boundaries, crossings, earthworks or similar features may be hypotheses unless the report identifies an authoritative source. Historic maps can be distorted or incomplete and LiDAR can show natural, agricultural and modern features as well as archaeological features.

Buried Beneath Vault Land Intelligence and Earthwork Intelligence are currently available only for locations in England. Locations outside England are not accepted for these services and analysis will not begin.

Where a location outside England is submitted, it is rejected before any analysis starts, and no Land credit is reserved or consumed. Find Identification is not affected by this restriction.

Coverage may be expanded to other parts of the United Kingdom in a future release. Even within England, the availability of individual datasets may vary from place to place, and Buried Beneath does not guarantee that every source, historic map or terrain dataset will be available for every supported location.

Buried Beneath Vault does not grant permission to enter land or to metal detect. You are responsible for obtaining the landowner's or lawful occupier's permission and for confirming the permitted area and any conditions.

You are responsible for checking whether detecting is lawful and appropriate, including restrictions relating to scheduled monuments, protected or sensitive sites, protected habitats, Crown or other restricted land, archaeological investigations, utilities, crops, livestock and local conditions.

A map pin, target, score or navigation instruction must never be treated as authority to cross a boundary or enter land.

You remain responsible for legal reporting obligations. In England and Wales, objects that may meet the legal definition of Treasure must be reported in accordance with the Treasure Act regime. Current government guidance states that Treasure must be reported to the local Finds Liaison Officer within 14 days of finding it or within 14 days of realising that it might be Treasure.

Buried Beneath Vault cannot make a binding legal determination that an object is or is not Treasure. Where appropriate, seek advice from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a Finds Liaison Officer, museum or relevant authority. Different regimes apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Coordinates, GPS, compass bearings, third-party maps and historic-map georeferencing have accuracy limitations. Device GPS accuracy can vary substantially.

Field Navigator and links to external navigation services are convenience tools only. Verify your location, boundaries, access and safety independently.

My Vault stores eligible find information, retained photographs and reports privately for your account. Access is controlled through authentication and private storage mechanisms.

Following successful Find analysis, original uploaded Front/Back image variants are designed to be deleted after retained WebP derivatives are safely stored. Archival and thumbnail WebP versions are retained while the applicable Vault retention rules apply.

If paid membership ends, the service is designed to provide a one-month read-only Vault retention period before scheduled deletion. The account should display the relevant deletion date. Download anything you wish to keep before that date.

We may retain limited records for longer where reasonably required for accounting, fraud prevention, security, dispute handling or legal compliance.

You retain ownership of photographs and information you upload. You grant Buried Beneath LTD a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, transform, transmit and analyse that material only as reasonably necessary to provide, secure, support and improve the requested service and to meet legal obligations.

You must have the right to upload the material. Do not upload unlawful content or personal information about other people unless you have a lawful reason to do so.

The service depends on third parties, which may include payment processors, AI providers, mapping providers, historic-map collections and public-data services. Source availability can change without notice.

If a source is unavailable, the report may omit it, identify it as unavailable, or provide a reduced analysis. We will not present missing coverage as negative evidence.

Mapping shown in the service includes Ordnance Survey data supplied to us through the OS Maps API under our OS API agreement. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights. As an end user of that mapping you agree to the terms in this section, which reflect the End User obligations required by the OS API Service Terms.

Permitted use. You may view and use the Ordnance Survey mapping (“Premium API Data”) only within the Buried Beneath Vault service, for your own internal research and personal or internal business use in connection with the reports and maps we provide. No other licence or right is granted to you.

Prohibited use. Except where we expressly make a feature available to you within the service, you must not: copy, extract, download, scrape, harvest, cache or store the Premium API Data or any substantial part of it; create derived data or derived works from it; sub-licence, resell, distribute, publish or otherwise make it available to any third party; remove, obscure or alter any copyright, database right, trade mark or attribution notice; or use it to develop, operate or support any commercial application, product or service (including any mapping, land-data or competing service) other than your permitted use of Buried Beneath Vault.

Intellectual property. All intellectual property rights, including copyright and database rights, in the Premium API Data belong to Ordnance Survey Limited and/or the Crown. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you.

Misuse. You must notify us promptly at support@buriedbeneath.co.uk if you become aware of any actual or suspected unauthorised use, copying or extraction of the Premium API Data, and give us reasonable assistance in dealing with it. We may suspend or terminate your access to the mapping, and where appropriate to the service, if you breach this section or if Ordnance Survey requires us to do so.

Ordnance Survey’s rights (Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999). This section 14a is made for the benefit of Ordnance Survey Limited as well as ourselves. Ordnance Survey Limited may enforce this section directly against you under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. Except as stated in this section, no person who is not a party to these Terms has any right to enforce them.

Ordnance Survey mapping is provided subject to the licence terms under which we obtain it. Those terms take precedence over anything inconsistent stated here, and we do not purport to grant you rights broader than those Ordnance Survey grants to us. Errors or omissions in OS mapping can be reported to Ordnance Survey through the errors and omissions link shown with the map.

We aim to provide the service with reasonable care and skill, but uninterrupted availability cannot be guaranteed. Maintenance, network failures, upstream API changes and external outages may affect the service.

We may improve or change features. We will not deliberately remove material paid-for functionality during a paid period without taking account of applicable consumer rights.

Nothing in these Terms limits statutory rights that cannot lawfully be excluded. Digital content and services must meet applicable legal standards, including being as described and provided with reasonable care and skill where the law requires.

If you are a consumer, you may have statutory cancellation rights under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, normally for 14 days from the date the contract is made, where those rights apply. This is separate from ordinary membership cancellation and is not a money-back guarantee.

Where you expressly ask us to begin providing services or digital content during the applicable cancellation period, those rights may be affected. In particular, statutory rights relating to digital content may be lost once supply begins where the legal requirements for express consent and acknowledgement have been met. For services begun at your request, any refund due may take account of services already supplied. Asking for immediate supply does not by itself remove every possible cancellation right for the whole membership.

If you wish to exercise a statutory cancellation right, please contact Buried Beneath LTD by email at support@buriedbeneath.co.uk, clearly stating that you wish to cancel under your statutory cooling-off rights and giving the email address of your Vault account. Using the Cancel membership button on its own stops future renewal; it is not treated as a statutory cancellation request.

Where your Membership page shows that you are eligible, you can instead use the in-app cooling-off refund route described in the Refunds & Cancellation Policy. The support route above remains available for statutory rights that may apply outside that route.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to the paragraph above and applicable consumer law, we are not responsible for losses caused by treating an expressly qualified research output, approximate valuation, landscape score, historic interpretation or navigation aid as a guaranteed fact or outcome.

We do not exclude responsibility where loss is caused by our failure to exercise the care or meet the standards required by law.

We may restrict or suspend an account where reasonably necessary to protect users, the service, payment integrity or security, or where there is serious or repeated breach of these Terms. We will act proportionately and take applicable consumer rights into account.

You may close your account using the available account/contact process. Closure does not remove records we must retain by law.

Use the Contact Us form and select the most relevant topic. We will aim to investigate complaints fairly and may ask for a report or transaction reference.

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK, mandatory protections and rights to bring proceedings in your home jurisdiction may still apply.

We may update these Terms for legal, regulatory, security or service changes. The current version and effective date will be published. Where a change materially affects an existing paid subscription, we will provide appropriate notice.

Version 1.7, effective 28 September 2026 (current): clause 16 refers eligible customers to the in-app cooling-off refund route; version 1.6 is retained unchanged. Version 1.6, effective 28 September 2026: clause 16 now explains statutory cooling-off rights separately from ordinary membership cancellation and how to exercise them; version 1.5 is retained unchanged. Version 1.1, effective 8 September 2026: adds clause 8a recording that Land Intelligence and Earthwork Intelligence are available for locations in England only. Version 1.0, effective 29 August 2026, is superseded from 8 September 2026 and is retained unchanged as the historical record. The version you accepted, and the date you accepted it, are recorded against your account.