ABSTRACT
It is valuable to study landscapes and local oral histories together as these histories contain spatial and cultural relations that are intertwined with each other. Local personal histories balance the official, dominant history, which has been created by memory institutions. This chapter uses personal histories as a tool for studying the values and the possible discrepancies of values with the focus on heritage. The in-depth interviews reveal that the well-meant vision that the heritage board is promoting, namely claiming that heritage protection is the future investment for the next generations, is often unrecognised among the villagers, because the idea of rurality for them is lost. This brings along resistance and, worse, irritation towards heritage protection, seeing it as conserving backwardness. The study leads to more general conclusions that the local community’s knowledge about their environment has to be studied since landscape biographies offer input in the planning exercise.
