Outstanding Universal Value

A landscape of Outstanding Universal Value… 

The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site is made up of a great many features which are internationally important. These features, known as ‘Attributes’, are what makes the World Heritage Site special. Together they express the Outstanding Universal Value - the international importance - of the World Heritage Site and reflect the distinctive character of the mining landscapes of Cornwall and West Devon.

The seven Attribute types can be found, in differing concentrations, across the ten Areas of the World Heritage Site and are as listed below. A video showing the Attribute types can be seen here (running time 04:13).

Attribute types

• Mine sites, including ore dressing sites

Includes Cornish type engine houses and other mine buildings, chimneys, dressing floors, mine dumps and related structures, as well as tin salvage works, and sites with significant underground access

• Mine transport

Includes ports, harbours, wharfs and quays, mine tramways and industrial railways, mine roadways, tracks and paths, mining-related canals

• Ancillary industries

Includes foundries and engineering works, smelting works, fuse and explosive works, arsenic and chemical works

• Mining settlements and social infrastructure

Includes mining towns, villages and hamlets, public buildings, Methodist chapels, preaching pits and new Church of England churches

• Mineworkers’ smallholdings

Comprises mineworkers’ farms and their buildings

• Great houses, estates and gardens

Comprises great houses and other substantial residences, lodge houses and other related buildings, estates, parkland and gardens, villas and embellished town houses

• Mineralogical and other related sites of particular scientific importance

Comprises internationally and nationally important type sites for minerals, important mining-related ecological sites