By Chris Hughes:

Driving along the coastal road into Southport from my home in Ainsdale I pass a motley collection of vehicles parked up on the beach. Half lorry, half boat these are, or rather were, the shrimpers of Birkdale. The photographs in this article were taken 10 to 15 years ago and there are fewer and less interesting vehicles left now. Although shrimping is still carried on it appears to be largely tractors employed in the process today and far less people are engaged in the activity.

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(above: inside the District Six museum, Cape Town)

An article I wrote for Slow Travel Berlin on the Olympic Village just outside Berlin was picked up by the Guardian as part of their Travel Network, in which they select certain blogs or articles from different travel websites to feature on the travel pages of Guardian.co.uk. One commentator wondered why anyone would want to visit somewhere like the semi-ruined Olympic Village in Elstal when there were more interesting places to go to in the city, and it got me thinking about how we chose to explore places – and which places we choose to explore – whether during our travels or closer to home. As regular readers of Under a Grey Sky will know, I am fascinated by places that can tell a story – whether in the middle of Berlin or a remote Scottish island – and I am certainly of the opinion that there is value to setting foot in these places, even if there is very little to see.

Why is that? Can I understand better the lives of workers in Wales, Germany or Sweden by walking through the relics of their industry? What do I learn about apartheid wandering the cleared streets of District Six in Cape Town? How do I further my understanding of the Holocaust by riding a bus from Krakow to Auschwitz to stand before a snowy field and try to comprehend what took place there? Some of us are simply interested in historical sites, whatever their state of disrepair, but there is also the more important issue about how or why we would maintain such sites, and what role they have in our understanding of historical events.

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The following article is by Sharon Blackie originally appeared on the Earthlines Magazine blog and is a very interesting read for anyone interested in the challenges of balancing tourism, access and sustainability in some of our most beautiful areas. Many thanks to Sharon for allowing us permission to re-post it here:

When we moved to this most remote south-western corner of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2010, we did so precisely because of its remoteness. We were looking for a quiet place, as far as it is possible to get in this too-cluttered country from the consumption-driven madness of the ‘civilised’ world. One of the many reasons we loved this region called Uig was that it was still unspoilt by an excess of tourism. Because, to us, the words ‘spoilt’ and ‘tourism’ have generally gone together. Tourism can be a very different thing from travelling. It can imply enormous camper vans that are too big for small single-track roads (too big even for their passing places) and that empty their chemical loos all over grazing land (yes, I know: not all camper van owners are so inconsiderate, but sadly many are); too-fast too-impatient cars driving at breakneck never-enough-time city speed, mowing down lambs as they go. It can imply too much inappropriate development – development that exploits a place rather than teaching people to respect and treasure it. It can imply curious people stopping and staring through your fence at you when you’re working on the croft as if you were some kind of museum piece or in a petting zoo. It can imply coachloads of tourists buying up mugs and teatowels that are mass-produced by children in China. It can imply stepping out of the car for a moment and ‘looking at the view’ – or photgraphing it – rather than truly putting yourself into a wild place and going with the flow. In short, it can imply damaging – to the environment, to the culture of a place, and to the inhabitants of that place getting on with doing their work.

I understand that I’ve focused on just one type of tourist experience in the previous paragraph. I understand that by no means all tourists are like this, and that walkers and many other travellers certainly are not. But I’ve lived in a couple of other remote and beautiful places where tourists have a tendency to take over for a good 50% of the year, and if your livelihood doesn’t depend on tourists and yet you’re still trying to manage animals and run a business, the all-too-frequent thoughtlessness can be immensely frustrating and so colours your perception.

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