World Heritage Site status for Forth Bridge
The Forth Bridge has become the sixth Scottish landmark to be awarded Unesco World Heritage Site status. The iconic red bridge has carried trains over the Firth of Forth since 1890 and the famous landmark now joins New Lanark, St Kilda, the Old and New Towns in Edinburgh, Neolithic Orkney and the Antonine Wall as Scotland’s latest World Heritage site.
World heritage status is given to sites of ‘outstanding universal value’ with the aim of protecting them for future generations, and the decision was announced yesterday at a meeting in Bonn after the UN’s cultural committee spent more than a year considering the nomination.
The Unesco inspection report said: “This enormous structure, with its distinctive industrial aesthetic and striking red colour, was conceived and built using advanced civil engineering design principles and construction methods.
“Innovative in design, materials and scale, the Forth Bridge is an extraordinary and impressive milestone in bridge design and construction during the period when railways came to dominate long-distance land travel.”
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