ABSTRACT
There are few really wild areas left in Britain today, and yet the lure of a ‘wilderness’ experience acts as a strong attraction to outdoor purists. The danger of overuse and degradation by outdoor recreationalists creates an urgent need to comprehensively identify, map and manage these wilder areas. It is possible to map both wild land quality and recreational use, and use the resulting overlays to identify spatial patterns and possible conflict areas. This is essential to developing an understanding of the conflicting needs of different stakeholders in landscape character and/in wilder areas. Only from such an understanding can we then hope to develop appropriate and well-founded policies on protected areas and wild land that are required to protect these unique parts of our natural heritage for future generations.
