Tourism has a negative impact on Castleton a honey pot location

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Tourism has a negative impact on Castleton a honey pot location

Introduction

For my GCSE geography coursework we are finding out whether tourism has a negative impact on Castleton a honey pot location.  Castleton is in the peak district.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the peak district in the u.k and where Castleton is located in relation to it. Castleton lies in the Hope Valley between the Dark Peak and the White Peak areas of the Peak District. It is a very popular tourist location as it is not too far from many towns as shown in figure 2 which is a map of Castleton in the High Peak.

Figure 2

There is a lot to do in Castleton and there is something for everyone as there are great walks, great scenery, shops and café’s and the village itself is beautiful. Figure 3 shows a close up map of Castleton and indicates some places which attract tourists.

Figure 3

The 4 main concepts within my study were:

  • Traffic congestion- how many cars were going into and away from Castleton at two set times and at three different places
  • Footpath Erosion- how much the footpath has been eroded by humans and how wide it has become from its original path
  • Land usage- the land used for different buildings and businesses as well as recreational activities
  • Sphere of influence- where people have come from. Shows how far people are going to travel to visit this place

Methodology

We collected data to test our 4 different concepts and 1 of my own ideas to test how tourism affects Castleton. The first aspect we tested was traffic congestion by doing a traffic count. We went to three roads that lead in and out of Castleton and over a 10 minute period we counted how many cars, lorries, bikes and other vehicles travelled towards the centre and away from the centre of Castleton.  We did this at the start of our visit and just before we were leaving. We tested this way so that we could get good sets of data that were accurate for specific places, rather than the whole of Castleton. We used Pindale Road, Buxton Road and How Lane as these are the three main roads leading into Castleton and would have the most amount of traffic. We tested in the morning as we believed that this would be the time when most tourists would be entering Castleton and the least tourists would be leaving. We also tested before we left as we believed that at this time more tourists would be leaving and less would be going into Castleton. We had no set sample size but counted the traffic for 10 minutes at each road and we counted a total of 6 times.

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The second aspect we tested was footpath erosion at one of the main hill walking areas in Castleton. We picked one area and measured the width of it. We then divided this width by ten and at every tenth we went along and measured the depth of the footpath. We recorded our data and did this all the way along our part of footpath. We then moved further up into the hills and measured another area of footpath. We did this because we needed to make sure we had more than one set of results so they were accurate ...

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