Get the biggest stories sent straight to your inbox Sign up for regular updates and breaking news from WalesOnline Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

The south Wales Valleys have a unique and extraordinary beauty which deserves protecting.

Those who don’t know about it are struck by the fact when they see the landscape for the first time.

Those who do, know this beautiful place is probably Wales’ best kept open secret.

Synonymous with industrial decline, poverty, worklessness, chronic health, the valleys’ picturesque qualities are not connected in general perceptions.

But they comprise a landscape of incredible diversity, populated by communities rooted in more than 100 years of political struggle and industrial toil.

With the disappearance of the pit heads has come the question facing politicians from parties of all hues.

“What do we do about the Valleys?”

Inward investment has come and gone, European funding has been pumped in by the billions but will soon run dry, the Communities First programme has been the victim of the axe.

All kinds of schemes have been dreamt up and shelved, millions upon millions of pounds have been spent.

Nobody’s been able to come up with a proper plan to give the valleys the fresh and radical direction they deserve.

The thinking’s often been too conservative, not original enough, lacking in co-ordination or long-term vision.

For this is not a region which is easy to fix with a one-size industrial policy.

Each village and town, each winding valley is different in its own way.

(Image: Simon Williams)

The glaciers which carved out these lineal basins formed places which look north and south more easy than they do east and west – overlooked by mountainsides inaccessible in the depths of winter.

As heavy industry has disappeared, so the Valleys have greened and begun a re-wilding all by themselves.

The rivers flowing have become clearer, trout and salmon have returned and bird and mammal life have followed.

Drive, cycle or walk to the top of the Rhigos, or the Bwlch, or Gelligaer Common or any of the hilltop spots to view the Valleys and the magnificence of south Wales is spread out before you.

And this is the thing.

Here are places within touching distance of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, not to mention the M4. After all, that short distance is the very reason those cities prospered as ports in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now

Within a 30-40 minute drive of Wales’ major cities are places you might mistake as being alpine wildernesses.

But what’s really been exploited out of that since the mining industry died? Not much.

Transport links are in a chronic condition, the pitiful rail network is stuffed full of passengers and under-invested, roads can’t cope with the traffic zooming southwards in the morning and northwards at night.

Unemployment, worklessness, economic decline. It might sound bleak.

It actually isn’t. Not least because that’s not the entire reality.

Establishing a Valleys National Park is a way of safeguarding the region’s rich architectural, industrial and environmental heritage without letting it become a museum piece.

This could not be a national park like all the others, it would have to be a national park which secures, fosters and develops the valleys environmentally, as well as promoting much of its wonderful built landscape – threatened because it is disused and unloved.

That means a national park which treasures the urban as much as the rural – it would make it a uniquely Welsh solution to a uniquely Welsh challenge.

Reintroducing long-lost animals such as beavers, replanting ancient woodlands, re-imagining towns and villages not as dying communities but as thriving and exciting places to live and work.

Creating a national park here could be a means of securing new investment, bringing new visitors as well as encouraging us to treasure this amazing landscape as we have never done before.

Recognising it as a living and breathing urban environment too would mean this national park would not merely become a touristy imagining of what the Valleys were, are or should be – but one which values its population and gives them a stake in its direction too.

People who visit the valleys for the first time never fail to be astonished by its beauty.

It’s time Wales really prized that beauty as a national asset too.