Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 16.2
Cannock Chase Country Park, Staffordshire, England
The preparation of the Cannock Chase Country Park
management plan was an exercise in applied research
(Rodgers
et al
. 1982). A landscape preference study was
used to clarify some critical management choices. The
park is intensively used for recreation, but much of it is
also designated as a site of special scientific interest
(SSSI), showing ecological characteristics transitional
between upland and lowland heath with fragments of
ancient oak woodland and mire communities. It is a
cultural landscape in that the open heathland is a result of
woodland clearance, sheep grazing and other forms of
land use over the last few hundred years (see Plate 16.1).
However, these practices had ceased by the 1940s, and
the landscape has measurably changed since then, with
birch, hawthorn scrub and seedlings from adjacent
coniferous plantations invading the heathland. Controlling
this vegetational change would be very expensive as
grazing was thought not to be a practical option.
Plate 16.1
Cannock Chase
Country Park.
The research team assumed that the open heath was
the most valued landscape for recreation, but evidence
of user preferences was needed before an expensive
management regime was recommended. A photo
preference study was therefore undertaken to measure
user preferences for different types of vegetation as
recreation environments (Burton 1982). The study was
designed as rigorously as possible to ensure that users
were responding to the different vegetation types and not
to any other aspect of the picture of the landscape.
Unexpectedly, the results indicated that users very
strongly preferred the ancient woodland; only a minority
ranked the open heathland vegetation as the most
preferred. The research teams' response was to put far
more research effort into investigating why the ancient
woodland was not regenerating and on proposals for the
management of its recreational use, while in the final
plan the heathland management proposals were justified
on ecological grounds rather than on their landscape
value.
scapes led to a very significant change in its status
ten years later (Phillips 1998). The realisation that
the surrounding landscape was a product of a
continuing regime of traditional (aboriginal) fire
management, and the formal acknowledgement of
the spiritual significance of Uluru to the
Aborigines (Layton and Titchen 1995) led to the
rescheduling of the site on the world heritage list
as an associative cultural landscape (Plate 16.3).
The implications of this change for tourism
management are potentially profound. Uluru is
one of Australia's most important international
tourist attractions and is seen as an awesome
natural feature that tourists wish to climb. The
traditional owners (Aborigines) see it as a place of
immense spiritual power that they do not climb.
Again, it remains to be seen how or whether the
reclassification of the park will be reflected in its
management planning.
Whatever the objectives of landscape
management, justifying the costs of management
is an ever-present strategic policy issue. CVT has
been applied to landscape in order to measure the
monetary 'worth' of landscapes (Box 16.3). In the
UK, the technique has been used in a project in
theYorkshire Dales National Park.
The extent to which the Yorkshire Dales
research, and its extension to the Norfolk Broads
(Bateman
et al
. 1994), has influenced UK strategic
policy is not clear, as the results in fact appear to
