A SIX-YEAR CAMPAIGN

It takes a community-led approach to become a geopark, which can take many years. Local people and organisations get together, create a bid and submit it to UNESCO for their scrutiny and approval.

“Our journey began in 2014,” explains Graham, “so it took about six years. However, we’d done a lot of preparatory work beforehand in a regeneration study to create a 30-year forward plan, called the Black Country Study.”

A partnership of local authorities, the British Geological Survey, Natural England and the Canal and River Trust carefully selected 44 sites. “They are extremely important as windows on the ancient world, through the features they contain,” Graham explains.

And it is an incredible world. Looking across a housing estate towards Dudley Castle, it’s difficult to imagine

ABOVE Red House Glass Cone by Stourbridge Canal was a site of glass production until 1936 that, some 428 million years ago, this was a subtropical seabed. Over many millennia, land masses moved and were compacted and crushed. Ice ages and changing sea levels eroded rocks, shaping the world we see today. During this process, the remains of living organisms became fossilised within the rocks.

The Earth’s 4.6 billion-year history is divided into different geological periods, each covering several million years. The evolution of living organisms helps us date the rocks we find their fossilised remains in. Singlecelled fossilised organisms are found in the oldest rocks, whereas organisms with a more complicated cell structure are found in younger rocks. So diverse is the Black Country’s geology that more than 700 different fossil species have been discovered here.

“We are a very different geopark,” adds Graham, “being very urban and dynamic. The incredible diversity of the geology and its enormous impact on the culture of this place was key to this being seen as world-class and unique.”