ABSTRACT
Heritage attractions have become an important tourism resource to many non-beach holiday destination areas.1-2 This has been boosted by an increasing interest in the past as an aesthetic, a phenomenon Hewison3 attributed to a nostalgic impulse offering stability and comfort in an uncertain age. While there is some evidence to suggest that the educational merits of some recent heritage attractions are open to question,4 there has been a recurrent interest by some professionals in how visitors to heritage attractions may be rendered 'mindful' so that they will be actively processing information and questioning what is going on in a setting.5 Indeed, there is also a considerable body of evidence which has demonstrated that learning is both one motivation for and one requirement of visiting heritage attractions^10 along with social interaction.11-12 Why learning demands should be important is open to debate. For example, drawing on the social theory of Bourdieu,13 Merriman14 suggested that visiting heritage sites and museums is a way for people to acquire symbolic 'cultural capital' in order to demonstrate and affirm their social status and position within society. At a structural level, Falk et al.15 have argued that museums (and by implication heritage sites) may represent the
best device society has developed for the transmission of concrete reality to large numbers of people.
