Hengistbury Head investigation.

AS and A Level Geography

Hengistbury Head investigation

CONTENTS PAGE

Page 3-Introduction

Page 5- Data Collection

Page 8- Data Presentation

Page 16- Data Analysis

Page 17- Bibliography

Page 18- Appendix

Introduction and aims

Our aim in this investigation is to investigate the management of Hengistbury Head. Hengistbury Head is in the county of Dorset and it is 2 miles away from Christchurch. Hengistbury Head is 80-100miles from London and Bournemouth centre is approximately 6 miles to the west of it.. The nature of Hengistbury head is that it’s headland alinges west to east towards Mudeford. It has 3 main sections which are the South facing cliffs, the east facing cliffs and Mudeford spit. Its Geology is that it is mainly sedimentary rocks and it has sandstone on the clay cliffs. To show this Geology I have taken a map from the internet which outlines the materials in Hengistbury Head.

The cliffs also contain Iron because Iron forms in stagnant water areas over a long time.

Hengistbury is a popular tourist destination and it attracts 1.5 million visitors a year, Hengistbury Head is a popular tourist destination because it is very peaceful and it is not as busy and loud as other coastal areas such as Brighton and Blackpool. This kind of peace is very important to elderly people and Hengistbury Head certainly caters for elderly people more than they do for younger people. Hengistbury Head also has a nature reserve which is classed as a SSSI site which means to contain rare species of birds. Hengistbury Head also has a Scheduled Ancient monument (Sam) which is the double dykes and it was a very important location 2500 years ago. This means the area is now under threat from sea erosion, Sub aerial processes and Human activity like trampling and boat wash erosion.

It is being managed now to try and preserve vital parts of the land. Foot paths have been fenced off to avoid trampling and some paths have been laid down especially to stop people taking alternative routes. Quareying has also been a big problem in Hengistbury Head and this picture of how a cliff has been eroded by Quareying shows the scale of this problem.

The cost to maintain Hengistbury Head has been 4.5 million spent in 23 years and this is quite a large sum of money to maintain a site like this. I don’t think the costs are justified because you cannot really see anything that has cost a large amount of money and money looks like it has just been wasted doing small projects which should not cost that much. I think management of Hengistbury Head could be improved by the management trying to use their money far more economically and I think that money should be spent on projects which will really help to maintain Hengistbury Head.

To support my investigation I collected my data by going out to Hengistbury Head for 2 days and taking down various pieces of information about the site. I will use the data I collected as primary data and I will get my data and put it in to a information table to show it in a structured and systematic way.

Data Collection

In our data collection we need two different types of data, primary data and secondary data. Primary data is the vital data we need and we have collected ourselves for example the car park survey we did where we determined where the cars that were in a car park in Hengistbury Head came from and how many cars were there. Secondary data could be data that was given to us and that serves us as background data for example the types, number and location of sea defences.