Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:22 pm on 22 June 2021.
Llywydd, I thank the Member for that question. Yesterday was a great day with the reopening of the forest drive. I have hugely fond memories of it, of taking my children there when they were growing up, and I was lucky enough, Llywydd, to be able to visit it again in March of this year, together with some families of people who had died during the coronavirus crisis, where trees were being planted in memory of loved ones. It was a stunningly beautiful day, and just the sheer wealth of that natural environment is an amazing asset that we have. It's gone through a very tough time, Llywydd, as you know—115,000 trees had to be felled along the drive because of sudden oak death syndrome, which affected the larch trees, in fact, in Cwmcarn, and that's why it's taken all these seven years for it to be reopened.
But the point that Rhianon Passmore makes is the important one: that, over those long years, those local groups, those very committed people and the genuine commitment of the local authority to that site is what has led to its reopening, not just as it was before, but with all those additional facilities to which the local Member referred, and I know will go on drawing many people now to the reopened site. And it is, as she said, part of that wider pattern of investment that we promised through the work of the Valleys taskforce—the money that we have invested in those destination venues. You can really make a journey across those Valleys communities now from one of those destination sites to another, each one of them with new investment in it, each one of them saying something special about the history or the environment of that part of Wales, and I think many, many visitors will rediscover the richness of those communities, and Cwmcarn will certainly be one of the jewels in that experience.