Terms of use

Nothing on this site is permission to swim, and no badge here is a safety clearance. A green “no current pollution alerts” means only that the relevant agency has not published a warning and that recent official ratings were acceptable. It is the absence of a published problem, not the presence of safety.

Bathing-water monitoring measures bacteria. It says nothing about tides, rip currents, swell, undertow, water temperature, cold-water shock, submerged objects, boat traffic or your own swimming ability — and those are what most often cause harm. A beach can hold the highest possible water-quality classification and still be dangerous on the day you visit.

Conditions change faster than any data feed. Check the weather, the tide and the water in front of you. Read the signage at the beach — where this site and a sign at the water’s edge disagree, believe the sign. Never swim alone. See the RNLI’s open-water safety advice.

You use this site, and you enter the water, at your own risk. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Sevenoways Innovations Limited accepts no liability for any loss or injury arising from reliance on information published here. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud, where the law does not permit that.

Everything is republished from official sources: the Environmental Protection Agency in Ireland, the Environment Agency in England, Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and DAERA in Northern Ireland, plus OpenStreetMap for some amenities and Open-Meteo for modelled sea conditions.

We relay what they publish. We do not verify it independently, we do not inspect any location, and we cannot guarantee it is current or correct — an agency’s feed can be delayed, wrong, or silent about a real problem. Each page names the body that published its data so you can go to the source. How we know sets out the sources, the update cadence and the specific limitations.

A small number of spots carry a hand-set status with a cited reason — well-known places that no agency monitors, where a local authority has advised against swimming. Those cite the authority that issued the warning, and they can warn but never clear.

Use the site for your own purposes, personal or commercial. Do not attempt to disrupt it, do not use automated means to place load on it beyond ordinary crawling, and do not present our output as your own assessment or as an official safety determination.

Automated access for search and AI systems is welcome — see llms.txt. If you quote this site, attribute the monitoring body and include the date, as that file explains.

The underlying data belongs to the agencies that publish it and remains under their licences — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 for Irish EPA data, the Open Government Licence v3.0 for the UK agencies, ODbL for OpenStreetMap, CC BY 4.0 for Open-Meteo. Those licences require attribution, which each page carries.

The site’s own design, code, wording and branding are ours. Reusing the underlying agency data under its own licence is fine and encouraged; wholesale copying of the site is not.

The site may carry advertising and, in future, paid listings from businesses serving swimmers. These are kept structurally separate from the water-quality information: a business can be featured near a spot, but a spot can never be presented as safe, cleaner or better rated because someone paid. If that ever appears to have happened, tell us and we will fix it.

These terms may change as the site does; the date at the top reflects the last substantive revision. They are governed by the laws of Ireland. Questions to hello@wheretoswim.eu.