Planning and Developing Trails and Routes - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 178

Case Study: Heritage Trails in the United Kingdom Shaped
by Local Government Policies ( Continued )
integration and inclusion. A popular vehicle for this remit has been trails
and routes. Hayes and MacLeod (2008) examined 33 local cultural strat-
egies (LCS) and found four major policy drivers shaping the development
of trails by local authorities, namely social, economic, environmental
and cultural. They also used this categorization to group the rationales
of trail development as part of local government policy thinking (see
Table 6.3).
Table 6.3 reveals a high degree of complexity in setting objectives
when mapped against the social, cultural, economic and environmental
rationales. Hayes and MacLeod (2008) used one LCS (South Gloucester-
shire Council) to outline the overlapping rationales used to justify
the development of the Thornbury Millennium Trail (see Table 6.4).
An audit of the LCSs revealed that heritage trails, as part of cultural
policy making, varied in terms of scale, purpose, governance, develop-
ment, usage, partnerships and management. Hayes and MacLeod
(2008) suggested that a useful typology of trail development to evalu-
ate the above criteria was to classify trails as simple, standard or
sophisticated. This 3-S categorization is a useful way of further
understanding small and medium-scale trails and routes, as they were
presented in Chapter 1.

Table 6.3 Trail objectives and rationale within UK local cultural strategies

Social Cultural Economic Environmental

Life-long
learning

Preservation and
memory

Funding and
stakeholder
network

Rural renaissance
and sustainability

Community
engagement

Celebration Destination image Spatial planning

and monitoring

Social
inclusion

Identity New visitor

attractions and
recreational
opportunities

Widening
access

Linking cultural
attractions

Branding/
marketing diverse
attractions

Conservation
built and natural
heritage

Health/safety
benefi ts

Display of public art
Story telling

Regeneration Protection

Source: After Hayes and MacLeod (2008: 62).