Heritage Tourists: Responsible, (f)or What?

Abstract

There is the ever-present danger that much of debate in tourism hangs on definitional niceties (Wheeller 2007), to the extent that analysis becomes academic – inexorably taking discussion ever further away from the world of the tourist into the (separate) realm of tourism academe. ‘Heritage’ is a case in point: suitably ambiguous, its precise meaning – let alone what it generically represents – open to conjecture. Even if it were possible to draw exact parameters around an acceptable, ‘workable’ definition, interpretation of that thereby encompassed would still be subjective. The complexities as to what actually constitutes a heritage attraction are perhaps best exemplified in Prentice’s (1993) attempt at a 23-category classification. The emphasis of Ashworth’s probe appears to be focused on the effects tourists have on the built heritage/ environment. But I would hazard a guess that a layperson’s (i.e., tourist’s?) interpretation of ‘heritage’ would embrace far wider dimensions than this rather narrow perspective. As, indeed, would those of guardians (self-appointed or otherwise) of ‘heritage’. Uzzell’s (1989) influential Heritage Interpretation was sub-titled The Natural and Built Environment. In the UK, the recent popularity of the television series, The Coast, would suggest that natural heritage and, currently, coastal heritage in particular, constitute significant elements in the nation’s psyche… and not only in an idealised,

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