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 landscapes, sites, features, monuments and 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 two main areas:
- Tangible culture: this includes landscapes, 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
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 and land management such as dry stone walling and hay making, traditional crafts and folk songs. It incorporates above ground structures, below ground archaeology, folk tales and traditions and skills. Many people who live and work in the North Pennines hold knowledge of cultural heritage, and the things that are celebrated and from which our stories are drawn, should reflect their voices and experience wherever possible.