When I open my computer to start work each day, I am presented with a screensaver photograph courtesy of Microsoft depicting some dramatically scenic and distant part of the world – often in the USA or South America. My reaction is often ‘Nice, but we have just as good in Wales’. Don’t just take my word for it: in hailing the inscription of the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales as a World Heritage cultural landscape, journalists have been reaching for superlatives. Long-abandoned slate settlements in their upland setting have been compared to the 15th-century Peruvian citadel of Machu Picchu, while the silhouettes of windowless slate mills and engine houses have been likened to the romantically ruined shells of medieval abbeys and cathedrals.
Of course, it is not for aesthetic or poetic value that one is granted World Heritage status. You have to make a convincing statement of ‘outstanding universal value’ and demonstrate that your nominated site meets a number of strict criteria relating to integrity, authenticity, and evidential value. In order to do this, my colleagues at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales – especially industrial archaeologist Louise Barker and aerial photographer Toby Driver – have worked with slate archaeology expert David Gwyn for the last five years to produce a hefty 472-page dossier of evidence to back the nomination.
You also have to produce a conservation management plan that will protect the special values inherent in the nominated landscape in perpetuity, and this task has fallen to a partnership of heritage institutions led by Gwynedd Council and including the Welsh Government, Cadw, the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park, the National Museum of Wales, the National Trust, Bangor University, and many individual businesses, farmers, and landowners. It is to their credit that they have collectively succeeded in persuading some very hard-to-please heritage and conservation experts that this exceptional industrial landscape meets World Heritage criteria.
