Significance and value
In 2008 Historic England produced Conservation Principles: Policies and Guidance for the Sustainable Management of the Historic Environment. This set out a process for the assessment cultural heritage significance based on a series of Heritage Values set out below. A cumulative assessment of these, allows an evaluation of an asset’s significance.
- Evidential Value: the potential of a place to yield evidence about past human activity. This is usually in the form of archaeological or architectural information.
- Historical Value: the ways in which past people, events and aspects of life can be connected through a place to the present – it tends to be illustrative or associative.
- Aesthetic Value: the ways in which people draw sensory and intellectual stimulation from a place.
- Communal Value: the meanings of a place for the people who relate to it, or for whom it figures in their collective experience or memory.
The North Pennines landscape, its settlement patterns, field patterns, mining heritage and other historical structures embody highly significant evidential value about a wide range of past human activity in the region. Some of this evidence is clearly obvious in the landscape and the National Landscape team has led several projects, for example the Allen Valleys Landscape Partnership and the Land of Lead and Silver project, to conserve this evidence of mining heritage through consolidation and recording.
The National Landscape team’s Lidar Landscapes Project indicated the complex evolution of the physical landscape and human impact upon it over a very long time period from prehistory to the present and initiatives like the Fellfoot Forward Landscape Partnership Scheme have increased our understanding of important sites such as the Long Meg stone circle.
All of these data form the skeleton upon which to build ‘the story’ of the evolution of important aspects of North Pennines Cultural Heritage and allows for its detailed and readily accessible interpretation.
By the same token individual sites and locations within the region are closely associated with important regional and national events and historical characters. Again, these associations contribute markedly to the significance and value of the broader cultural heritage of the North Pennines. Recent work on the Monastic Grange at Muggleswick near Edmundbyers and the Bishop of Durham’s hunting park in Weardale, in particular the excavations at Westgate Castle, have affirmed the important economic links that the area had with the See of Durham over a long period of time.
The significant work of the Weardale-based architect George Race should be acknowledged here. He was responsible for the design and construction of a number of the important non-conformist chapels in the North Pennines and elsewhere, particularly in Weardale and Teesdale, e.g Hamsterley, Middleton in Teesdale, Mickleton, Westgate, Nenthead and Wolsingham. Likewise, the philanthropical work of the Quaker London Lead Co. in Teesdale and Alston Moor, and WB Lead in Weardale and the Allendales is of particular historical importance. Robert Stagg, the London Lead Company’s early nineteenth century agent, over saw the construction of new sanitary workers housing at Masterman Place and Newtown or New-Middleton, in 1823. It was fair-rent regulated and designed by the famous local architect Ignatius Bonomi. Further company housing was built in Nenthead in 1825. Stagg and the company also promoted reading rooms and libraries and opened free schools at Middleton and Nenthead. Thomas Sopwith the acclaimed geologist, railway engineer and mining engineer was, from 1845, based in Allenheads, where he was agent for W.B. Lead. He kept the position until his retirement in 1871 and in this role, like Stagg, he advocated for social and educational reform, introducing a number of measures to improve the welfare of workers and their families, including the construction of new housing with a focus on health and family comfort and educational opportunity. To this latter end he opened schools in Allenheads, Carrshield and Sinderhope. On his retirement in 1871, Sopwith received a testimonial from 1,621 workers, acknowledging his contributions to improving their lives.
In terms of aesthetic value people have always drawn sensory and intellectual stimulation from the region. It has inspired artists, novelists, musicians and poets to produce some of their finest works.
The crime writers Anne Cleeve and John Dean, for example, have set several of their ‘Vera’ and ‘DCI Jack Harris Murder Mysteries’ in the North Pennines.
W. H. Auden also spent much time in the area and some forty poems, and two plays are set here. He referred to the region as his “Mutterland”, his “great good place”, and equated it with his idea of Eden. Scores of Pennine placenames are found in his work, including Cauldron Snout and Rookhope. The nineteenth century lead miner poets Richard Watson and John Hunt also celebrated the region.
The great landscape artist William Turner was also inspired by the area of the National Landscape and on one of his northern visits he painted an exceptional rendering of the waterfall at High Force. A crop of local artists currently also draw their inspiration from the National Landscape.
The many visitors to the area also celebrate its serenity, beauty and the sense of wellbeing that a period out in the National Landscape inspires. It is impossible to put a material value on the importance of the aesthetic values embodied in the North Pennines and this fact alone would makes a massive contribution to the region’s ‘intangible’ heritage.
The impact of aesthetics in conjunction with communal values attached to the broader cultural landscape is how space is turned into ‘place’ for many people who live in and/or visit the National Landscape.
This aspect of significance goes beyond the tangible, quantifiable importance of the region’s cultural heritage. It takes us very firmly into an appreciation of the importance of ‘intangible’ heritage, the way in which the region’s folklore, traditional music, poetry and literature are woven together into a skein that promotes nuanced aspects of regional significance often not even fully understood by the area’s residents. This, in conjunction with evidential and historical values, should allow for an holistic understanding of the highly significant, broad, base of the National Landscape’s cultural heritage. It should also provide the basis for the production of high quality, accessible, interpretations of the component elements of the region’s cultural heritage. This should promote wider public engagement with the region, hopefully ensuring that this will lead to a long-lasting realisation of the importance of protecting and conserving what is a highly significant and important area of Britain’s uplands.