Method, Data Interpretation and Evaluation for 'How Tourism Has Changed Hawkshead'

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How Has Tourism Changed Hawkshead?

Aim 1

  • To investigate how land use in Hawkshead has changed

Aim 2

  • To discuss reasons why land use in hawkshead has changed

Aim 3

  • To find out if changes have damaged or benefited Hawkshead

Introduction

Hawkshead is located in the Lake District, in the North West of England. It is a small village, home to many retired or second homeowners. The village receives its main source of income through tourism. This becomes evident after spending even a short while in Hawkshead, as there are numerous amounts of Bed and Breakfasts located in and around the village. Tourists come to Hawkshead to admire the scenery, to take long walks or more generally they come to escape from their busy lives and relax for a weekend. Hawkshead is located on a rural hilly landscape (much of which is used for farming) and is an extremely beautiful part of England.

Here are some maps to show the location of Hawkshead, all maps are obtained from the website .

The first map shows the location of Hawkshead in the Lake District.

The second map shows the location of Hawkshead in the Northwest

The last map shows the location of Hawkshead in the United Kingdom

There are many forms of transport to reach Hawkshead, the most accessible are by car or ferry. To drive to Hawkshead from Southport it takes on average an hour and forty minutes, but depending on traffic it can differ. To drive from major cities such as Liverpool it takes around two hours and from Manchester it takes about one hour forty-five minutes. These times were obtained from the website routeplanner

Tourists visit Hawkshead for its beautiful scenery, quaint stone cottages and its general relaxed atmosphere. Most of the cottages were built in the 15th century, but have been updated and have received lots of necessary maintenance work since then.

One of the biggest changes that have affected Hawkshead is that it has become a national park. Hawkshead and the surrounding area of Hawkshead (the Lake District) is all part of a national park. The Lake District became a national park in 1951. This is because it was seen as a beautiful part of the countryside, and therefore needed to be protected to ensure that it would stay in the same condition, and would not be ruined as many other parts of the Britain have been. The Lake District has been put under the protection of the national park, so that the community and tourists alike can all visit the Lake District and enjoy the peace and quite along with the preserved natural beauty.

In recent years Hawkshead has been visited more often than ever, this is mainly due to the fact that more people have better jobs and a higher salary, which therefore means they can afford to go on more holidays, and better day trips. Also tourism has increased throughout the world as it has become easier and quicker to travel, think of the Euro Tunnel, which can get us to France in half an hour. This makes it much easier for tourists to get around and to visit places further away.

Methodology

I have used five different methods to investigate how tourism has changed Hawkshead. The first method I used was in the form of a questionnaire. This is a primary data collection technique. I used this method to find out what the residents of Hawkshead and the tourists that visited Hawkshead a number of times thought about the question ‘How Has Tourism Changed Hawkshead?’ I also used my questionnaire to see out of the twenty people I asked how many of them were tourists, by doing this we could then compare the amount of tourists with the amount of residents and see whether we asked more of one than the other. We used our questionnaire to obtain some primary data as it was an easy clear way of collecting detailed information about people’s views of Hawkshead.

        Before going to Hawkshead, my group made up our own original question to ask in our questionnaire, it was; do you feel Hawkshead has changed since your last visit? We chose this question to find out about tourists opinions, but most of the tourists we asked had not been to Hawkshead before and therefore could not answer this specific question, if we were to repeat this investigation we would choose a question that could be answered by everyone and would therefore give us more data to work from. We also tried to survey different age groups but most of the people walking around seemed to be around the same age.         

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        When we were in Hawkshead carrying out our questionnaire we stood by a fairly busy street so we would have enough people to ask our questions to. Some people in my group suggested standing outside the tourist information centre, but we realised this would make are results bias as we would questionnaire more tourists than homeowners and as a results not obtain a good range of data. We spoke to 4 residents, 2 second home owners and 14 tourists and asked them our questions. We asked anyone as we wanted to obtain fair data and instead of asking all the ...

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