What is the UK's human cultural heritage?

Recognising, and protecting for the future, the ‘living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants’.

It’s World Heritage Day today (18 April), which coincides nicely with an announcement made by the UK government earlier this week that it’s working towards defining an ‘inventory of living heritage’.

I tend to think of the distinction between history and heritage like this: history is what happened, while heritage is the places, the objects, and the customs that still exist today and which help us tell the (hi)story of the past.

Living heritage – or intangible cultural heritage, as it’s formally known – focuses on the ‘customs’ bit: from storytelling, performing arts, and crafts, to festivals, sports, and games, and even our practices connected to the land and food.

Last year, the UK government signed up to UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Part of the process involves member countries creating a list of traditions, skills, and customs practised by its communities.

Inventories will be drawn up across the four nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and later this year the public will be invited to share their nominations for inclusion.

Thatching dates back as far as the Bronze Age and was the most commonly used roofing material in Britain until the 17th Century. Techniques vary across the UK and are often dependant on local materials. In Northern Ireland today, only around 180 thatched buildings remain, with only five thatchers based in the nation – three of whom are retired or semi-retired. Without training intervention, the craft is at risk of loss (some regional variations, such as stapple thatch, have already been lost), as are the remaining thatched buildings (25% of which are in poor or very poor condition).

The aim of the inventory and UNESCO list is to capture the quintessential ‘living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants’. This could include anything from the death-defying cheese rolling that takes place in Gloucestershire in southwest England, to Welsh love spoon carving, the skill of thatching (which is at risk in Northern Ireland), or the prickly-suited Burryman who parades through Queensferry, near Edinburgh in Scotland.

Cheese rolling: on a long weekend every May, competitors are invited to chase a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a 180m hill that has a 50% (26.6 degree) gradient. The cheese is never actually caught, but whoever makes it to the bottom of the hill first, wins. Today the event is as famous for its competitor injuries as anything else. The earliest written evidence of the tradition dates from 1826, when it was mentioned in a message to the Gloucester town crier, but even that indicates it was already well established. Gloucester City Council suggests it could date back at least 600 years.

It was David ‘Doc’ Rowe who introduced me to the Burryman, and many other examples of the UK’s living heritage, when I interviewed him about his folk customs archive last year. As you might guess, he welcomes this “serious exploration” of the UK’s “astonishing human cultural traditions” which he has found are often unknown, overlooked, or even treated trivially.

He hopes that recognition will “honour the dedication and legacy of many ‘tradition bearers’ who in some places, despite opposition, continually upheld these customs and to whom we owe a great debt”.

The Burryman: on the second Friday in August each year in South Queensferry in Scotland, a willing volunteer is encased in a 'suit' made up of burrs (nature's Velcro) and must walk a 7mile route through the town for up to 10 hours. Known to have existed in the 18th Century, origin stories for this event range from a disguised King Malcolm hiding from the English, to an act of appeasement to encourage a good catch for the local fishermen. Today he's considered as a kind of scapegoat and that gifting him money or whisky will ward off bad luck. The Burryman drinks whatever he's offered through a straw, and is unable to sit, eat, or attend to any bodily functions throughout the day.

Rowe emphasises that the UK’s traditions and customs are not activities fixed in time, but ones that “exist and evolve in an ever-changing landscape”. They are “spontaneous, vernacular, and organic practices which continually respond to change […] using the best from the past, distilling and embracing elements for the present, but caring for and developing the form for the future”.

They are, indeed, our ‘living heritage’.

Love spoons: Wales' national museum, Amgueddfa Cymru, cares for a collection of more than 60 decoratively carved love spoons. The oldest dates from 1667. While the museum says the exact origin of the tradition is unknown, it's believed they were first crafted by men as gifts for women they admired. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the tradition of giving love spoons as romantic gifts was firmly established, while today it’s evolved to include the commemoration of events from weddings and christenings, to birthdays and anniversaries.

What would you nominate for the UK’s inventory of living heritage?