Niall Finneran’s research while affiliated with University of Winchester and other places

The English coastline represents arguably the most extensive and diverse natural landscape in the country, drawing a wide range and number of visitors annually. Here we focus specifically on the intertidal zone, the part of the shore revealed before and after the high tide. This is an area of rich ecological diversity and also of important historical interest. The intertidal zone is not just associated with the sea, but also the tidal zones of rivers and their estuaries. In this chapter, we will be considering the impact of the recently completed Heritage Lottery Funded CITiZAN project (Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network) and how it sought to engage communities in the recording of fragile cultural and natural heritage on Britain’s coasts. Although obviously having an archaeological focus, we argue that this project can act as a template for future sustainable inclusive and participatory approaches to managing coastal heritage, and not solely in the UK.

This chapter will explore themes and issues in the management of landscapes of cultural value using as a core case study the National Trust portfolio on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset (UK). Key ideas and issues to be drawn out include: an assessment of the challenges faced by the National Trust in a post-COVID-19 environment in managing and interpreting portfolios based on natural landscapes, coastal sites, prehistoric and later archaeological sites and post-industrial and military training spaces, and above all, how the Trust engages with local stakeholders and navigates issues around climate change and tourist pressure. Recent political interest in the work and outreach of the National Trust will also be considered within this context.

This chapter will examine the pressures on Caribbean islands in the post-COVID-19 world, considering how the demands of tourism and threats of climate change are forcing governments and non-governmental organisations to devise creative and sustainable solutions to the management of fast-disappearing natural landscapes. This is imperative as these small island economies, traditionally geared towards tourism as a key economic activity, seek to rebuild in the wake of almost two years of global COVID-19 lockdown. Furthermore, it is becoming clear that increased hurricane and tropical storm activity, driven by climate change, is resulting in more frequent and destructive weather episodes. The fragile ecosystems of Caribbean landscapes and seascapes are at risk from extreme weather, and also linked to extensive tourism footfall and associated infrastructural development, from human driven factors. Using a series of case studies drawn from Barbados, we examine how an approach to sustainable natural heritage tourism can be framed in the post-COVID-19 and climate changing world.

For decades, literature on the management of green and blue spaces and their uses has been founded in two distinctive sources. The academic repository, comprised of primarily peer-reviewed journal papers, has tended to detract practitioners for their very nature of academic design, composition, debate and discourse traditionally deployed. Yet within these works, a critical voice on both practice and theory is developed contributing to enhancements in the management of natural spaces.

This chapter considers the influences of the nineteenth-century artistic Romantic movement towards the development of management strategies for natural heritage sites and how the legacy of this perspective pervades into the present day. The author takes primarily a British perspective, analysing the role played by poets, artists and writers in provoking a wider interest in engaging with natural heritage, but with a nod towards developments in the United States and Northern Europe at this time. It is argued that this is an overlooked contribution, and that nineteenth-century artistic attitudes to the natural world in the nineteenth century as well as its accessibility, played an important role in the emergence of the National Trust in 1895, as well as later popular perceptions of natural heritage in the UK. It is further argued that these intellectual currents underpin modern approaches to sense of place and the phenomenology of landscape.