Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES
Volume 28, Issue 2, Pages 163-179Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2021.1941198
Keywords
Heritage; wetlands; peatlands; perceptions; tripadvisor
Funding
- Joint Programme Initiative - Cultural Heritage under the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/S006427/1]
- AHRC [AH/S006427/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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User-generated reviews are widely used in tourism research, but less so in cultural heritage research. A qualitative analysis of user-generated reviews on three peatland heritage landscapes in the UK reveals that visitors tend to emphasize natural over cultural heritage, with diverse and sometimes conflicting perceptions. This presents challenges and opportunities for building public appreciation of peatland cultural heritage.
User-generated reviews of visitor attractions, on publicly available websites, such as Tripadvisor, are frequently used in tourism research but feature less often in published cultural heritage research. In this paper, we describe a qualitative analysis of the text from user-generated reviews of three peatland heritage landscapes in the United Kingdom - Ilkley Moor, Thorne and Hatfield Moors, and Shapwick Heath - to better understand the role tangible and intangible cultural heritage play in visitor perceptions and narratives of these sites. Our analysis indicates that visitors tend to emphasise natural over cultural heritage of peatland landscapes and hold plural, highly contextual and sometimes dissonant perceptions; there is no single story of peatlands. This presents both challenges and opportunities for building public appreciation of peatland cultural heritage. User-generated reviews offer, as-yet under-explored, potential data for use by heritage researchers and managers who seek to explore how visitors understand and use sites, and may also contribute to the emerging intangible heritage of heritage landscapes.
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