ABSTRACT
To tackle the concerns of a range of stakeholders involved in landscape management, there is a requirement to understand how ecosystems are, and have been, influenced by human actions and how stakeholders express their valuation of ecosystem services across spatial and temporal scales (UK National Ecosystem Assessment [NEA] 2011; Schröter et al. 2014). Plieninger et al. (2014) believe that conventional ecosystem services assessments ought to be complemented by aspects of socio-cultural attitudes, such as may be found in narratives. Narratives generally present a series of events which may be examined by retrospective analysis to gain an understanding of influencing factors and drivers of actions (Sandleowski 1991). Historical landscape narratives, which highlight natural events and occurrences, are linked to the social values and experiences which were deemed substantial and noteworthy at that particular point in time. So, the historical landscape perspective provides a frame of reference for building an understanding of landscape and ecosystem change (Swetnam et al. 1999; UK NEA 2014).
