The Lake District is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS), but what does that really mean? Hopefully the following article will give you an introduction to what World Heritage is and why the Lake District is one. If you have any questions, the staff here at Langdale will happily try and answer them.

So, who are UNESCO? The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.

Heritage is the planet’s legacy from the past, what is lived with today, and what is passed on to future generations. The world’s cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration. UNESCO use World Heritage to promote peace and cooperation amongst countries. WHSs belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the country where they are located.

It was the building of the Aswan Dam in Egypt that was the catalyst for World Heritage. The dam’s development would have meant the loss of the ancient Egyptian temple Abu Simbel. UNESCO managed to raise about $50m from UN members to dismantle the temple and rebuild it away from the proposed reservoir. As a result of this action, the World Heritage Convention was established, and the World Heritage List started.

There are four types of World Heritage Site – Natural, Cultural, Mixed and Cultural Landscape, roughly 1100 in total. Natural sites are WHSs for their scale and significance. Classic examples include Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest living thing on the planet; the Amazon Basin the most biodiverse place on the planet; the US’ Great Smokey Mountains National Park (NP) which has more trees than Europe. In UK, the mainland natural WHSs are geological – the Jurassic Coast and Giant’s Causeway; there are no ‘wild/natural’ WHSs on the mainland UK. The UK’s only natural WHSs are overseas terratories and so remote that they are virtually untouched by humans.

Cultural WHSs are instantly recognisable, like Venice, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids, all global icons. Cumbria has 2 WHSs; Hadrian’s Wall has been a WHS for over 30 years and not only stretches across the north of the county but continues as pockets down the county’s coast. Hadrian’s Wall is now part of a transnational WHS that includes the Antoine Wall in Scotland and the Limes in Germany. The small Cumbrian coastal village of Ravenglass is uniquely in both the English Lake District WHS and the Frontiers of the Roman Empire WHS. 

Mixed WHSs are those that have both Cultural and Natural treasures. An example is Machu Picchu in Peru - both an icon of Inca urban development but also an important tropical mountain rainforest.

The UK’s only mixed site is St Kilda, an important seabird sanctuary and a site of centuries of human occupation on edge of survival.

A Cultural Landscape demonstrates the evolving relationship between people and place, landscapes of the combined works of nature and humankind. This is the category the Lake District comes under, and with which we are intrinsically linked.

The English Lake District WHS has been a long time in the making; over 30 years. In the early 80s, the Lake District twice submitted nominations and on both occasions were deferred by UNESCO. They acknowledged the Lakes were special but felt that we didn’t fit the categories that existed at the time – Natural, Cultural and Mixed. UNESCO created the fourth category Cultural Landscape as a direct consequence of the earlier Lake District’s applications.

WH status only became back on the Lake District’s radar following Foot & Mouth and its impact on the rural economy. WHS was once again seen as a way of providing means of competitive advantage, sustaining and conserving our natural and cultural assets, and supporting the economy and communities. The Lakes once again submitted a nomination and was inscribed a WHS on 9th July 2017. It is the UK’s 31st and largest WHS and the only one that is also a National Park. Physically it follows the 1951 National Park boundary and is big and complicated, geographically and politically. It is divided into 13 separate valleys, with Langdale being one.

How do UNESCO choose WHSs? They have criteria against which prospective WHSs are judged. If you meet a number of these, you may be considered. UNESCO has experts in Culture and Nature who assess each nomination. If these experts decide that a nomination meets some of UNESCO’s criteria, you are then deemed to have Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). Its official definition is: “OUV means cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity”.

A WHS has only one OUV. The Lakes’ OUV comprises 3 interrelated attributes or themes. They are:

Identity – the Lake District is a landscape shaped by people

Inspiration – that its landscape has in turn shaped us, how we look at and relate to landscapes

Conservation – that the Lake District is the birthplace of global landscape conservation movement

The physical landscape is the natural ‘canvas’ upon which people have worked and lived. Humans have interacted with this landscape for millennium. Neolithic man, Romans, Vikings and Normans have all have left their mark on the landscape, but the Lake District’s WHS story starts around 1000 years ago, with the development and establishing of a system of traditional farming.

It is a distinctive, unrivalled and unique example of northern European upland farming based on the rearing of cattle and native breeds of sheep. It is the adaption of living and working within our spectacular and challenging mountain setting. The system of farming is characterised by enclosed farmland on the valley floors (inbye) and on lower valley sides (intakes), with open grazing on the uplands (common land). Langdale is a classic Lakeland farmed valley and provides visitors ample opportunities to see, hear, smell and experience this traditional farmed landscape.

The traditional field structures provide the backdrop for other aspects of our characteristic and unique landscape - distinctive and typical white farm houses and other buildings like two-storey bank barns, stone field barns and hogg houses. The Lake District’s traditional farming characteristics extend into the details found in and around farms. Outside you may see the likes of round chimneys, crow steps on the roofs and date stones above the doorways. Inside there can be found salt niches and spice cupboards, all adding to the uniqueness of the Lakes.

The bold and distinctive forms of vernacular farming architecture are echoed in the characterful and distinctive structures that appear across our countryside; packhorse bridges (great example near the Old Dungeon Ghyll), water smoots (gaps in walls where they cross streams), bee boles (holes in walls for straw bee hives) and drystone walls (like the Medieval ‘ring garth’ or boundary wall that runs along the fellside between New and Old Dungeon Ghylls).

It’s not just the physical aspects of upland farming that have left their mark on the landscape and contributed to the WH story. Local farming traditions like rearing native breeds (typically Herdwicks but also Rough Fell and Swaledales), hefting (how local sheep breeds are free to roam the open fell tops but genetically know where their home farm is and so don’t wander off), communal grazing and gathering (bringing in sheep in off the fell tops), smit marks (coloured dyes applied to sheep), and lug marks (cuts made into sheep ears to identify their home farm). Traditional skills like drystone walling, fleece shearing and hedge laying, and social events like sports days, agricultural shows and shepherds’ meets add to our uniqueness.

It is not just farming that has made its mark on the landscape. The Lake District is rich in stone and minerals and people have extracted these underground resources since Neolithic times. Since Elizabethan times extraction has been industrial and had major impacts on the landscape. Both Coniston and Keswick owe their existence to their mining wealth. Copper, iron, graphite (or wad), slate and much more has been dug up. The Lake District still has active quarrying that continues to shape the landscape, such as Elterwater slate quarry nearby.

With so much mineral ore being produced, and so much woodland available to supply charcoal fuel, the Lake District developed an early iron industry from simple hand-powdered iron smelters to blast furnaces. All of the major industries of Lakeland relied heavily upon the availability of timber or charcoal for fuel. To ensure a constant and sustainable supply the coppicing (cutting back a tree or shrub to ground level periodically to stimulate growth) of woodland developed (great examples can be seen close to Langdale Campsite). Using coppiced woodland resources, bobbin production supplied the globally dominant Lancashire textile mills and the production of black powder at so called ‘gunpowder mills’ for use in mining and quarrying (such as Elterwater).

The second theme “Inspiration” is how the Lakes’ landscape has shaped people.

To help explain this theme we need to set the scene…imagine it’s the early 18^th century, modern life is developing and the Lake District is seen as an awful place worth avoiding…in fact early visitor and renown author Daniel Defoe who came in 1724 described the area as "the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England”. In the 18^th century a proper gentleman or gentlewoman would seek out the finer things in life via a trip to Europe (the Grand Tour) whose natural and cultural highlights would make them a better person. However, circumstances in Europe were changing; war and revolution made visiting the Continent dicey and to be avoided. Attention was drawn to what lay on the doorstep; awareness of the north was growing and so the first travellers headed to the Lakes. But once there, they were unable to describe, articulate or comprehend the landscapes they came across and their emotions to them; the European pastoral ideals just didn’t fit in with the Lakes’ landscapes.

Cumbrian William Gilpin was one of the first to describe a new way of ‘reading’ these landscapes. This was the start of the Picturesque Movement. He introduced the idea of travelling to personally experience these different sceneries and to understand the reactions to them; a new way of enjoying beauty and a new way of describing it. The earliest visitors were poets, writers and artists, and their works inspired by the landscapes were reproduced across the country, building awareness of the Lake District. Cumbrians started to accommodate the growing numbers of visitors coming to experience the Picturesque. Local Thomas West developed a series of perfect locations (Viewing Stations) around several lakes where visitors were directed to stand and get the perfect Picturesque experience. 

Some of the early adopters of Picturesque were the well-off in the industrial north of England. They came and bought land in the Lake District, not to develop, but to enjoy and in their eyes, to enhance. Upon the lands they bought, they started to build glorious villas, a trend that lasted for about 200 years. As well as building houses they transformed the lands around their properties, again to improve the aesthetic qualities of their land. In Langdale a visit to High Close will give you the chance to experience a designed landscape first-hand.

William Wordsworth arrived back to his home county from his European travels in 1799. Following on from how the Picturesque Movement had developed a way of seeing and appreciating landscapes, Wordsworth evolved this thinking; how being in landscapes like the Lake District generated emotional reactions. This became the Romantic Movement. Romanticism promoted a shift from experiencing rational reactions to a personal response, an emotive experience, and an individual response to the world. Here in the Lakes Wordsworth developed his ideas around self and self-discovery, through engaging with nature and landscapes. He saw the Lakes as an authentic place, a refuge from modernity, and it can be argued that today’s visitors still come to the Lakes to escape their daily lives.

Wordsworth also promoted the Lakes’ as a ‘national property’, regardless of landownership. These landscapes were for all to enjoy and benefit from. And that these landscapes should be valued and protected, thinking that was supported and furthered by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and avid follower John Ruskin.

With Romanticism’s awaking of the public’s emotional connections to landscapes, came a sense within society that these landscapes were valued and should therefore be looked after. But this view was not necessarily shared by all. The Lake District became a contested landscape, an arena for the debate on what the land should be used for; whether for commercial gain or for public good. Over the next 250 years, the Lake District hosted notable clashes between industrial developments like railway extensions, commercial forestry and reservoir building, and the proponents of preserving landscapes. 

The thinking of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin and others, and the actions to fight developments that the Lake District was playing host to, led to ideas of conservation that inspired others. One of the founders of the concept of landscape protection via legislation, Ralph Waldo Emerson met with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Founding father of National Parks in the US John Muir was a keen follower of Ruskin and his environmental thinking. There is a direct lineage from the thinking and actions in the Lake District to the establishing of the National Parks. This model of landscape protection was to cross the Atlantic the following century and the Lake District became one of the first UK National Parks in 1951. 

The other model for landscape protection originating in the Lakes was through ownership. Canon Rawnsley was living in Grasmere and was aware that many notable scenic locations in the Lakes like Grasmere Isle and Lodore Falls were up for sale and potential development, with the possibility that they would be lost to the public forever. He realised there was the need for an organisation that would acquire and protect these beloved landscapes for the good of the public, and so the National Trust was formed in 1895. Today they continue to look after the Lakes for the public, including a lot of Langdale.

Both these models of landscape conservation, National Parks and National Trusts, have their roots here in the Lake District, and have reached across the world. There are over 3,000 National Parks and over 70 National Trusts across the globe, looking after landscapes for future generations. 

Together these three themes highlight how unique the Lake District is, and how important it is for current and future generations across the world.