Our goal is to conserve cultural heritage in the North Pennines National Landscape and to enable everyone to understand and enjoy it, now and in the future.
What is cultural heritage?
Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. It represents the collective identity and history of a group of people or a place.
Cultural heritage is usually divided into three main areas:
- Tangible culture: this includes buildings, monuments and artefacts – things you can see and touch
- Intangible culture: this includes oral traditions, folklore, language and knowledge – less concrete things that you can’t touch but which nevertheless exist in other forms
- Natural heritage: this refers to culturally significant landscapes and biodiversity
In the North Pennines this definition encompasses everything from redundant lead mining structures, planned villages, post-medieval field systems and mine engineering plans to knowledge of traditional ways of farming, proggy mat making and folk songs. It incorporates above ground structures, below ground archaeology, folk tales and traditions.