Closed areas
271 places around the UK where fishing, or one kind of fishing gear, is prohibited by law. CAUGHT watches inside all of them.
Each closure has its own page: what the rule actually says, the instrument that creates it, where its boundary runs, and every case our satellite sweeps have recorded inside it. Grouped by the authority that made the rule.
Nearly every closure here bans one kind of fishing rather than fishing itself, and which kind decides everything — a creel boat inside a bottom-towed gear ban is usually fishing lawfully.
No-take zones Bottom-towed gear Trawling Dredging All seabed fishing
Sea fisheries are devolved, so the authority, the instrument and often the rule itself change at the border.
Scotland England Wales Northern Ireland Isle of Man Jersey
Download the whole dataset as CSV or GeoJSON.