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The National Trust's Studland Beach, Dorset, is a vast area of sandy beaches and heathland with views of Old Harry Rocks.

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tourism in Studland

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The Holderness coastline is located on the east coast of England. It is the fastest eroding coastline in Europe.

Reasons for management

The coastline is rapidly eroding at an average of 1.8 metres a year. There are several reasons why the coast at Holderness is eroding so quickly:

- the cliffs are made from less-resistant boulder clay (made from sands and clays) which slumps when wet.

Naturally narrow beaches - these beaches give less protection to the coast as it doesn't reduce the power of the waves.

Man-made structures - have been installed to stop long-shore drift. This narrows unprotected beaches elsewhere even more.

Powerful waves - waves at Holderness travel long distances over the North Sea (so have a long ) which means they will increase in energy.

Management strategies

Bridlington is protected by a 4.7 km long sea wall.

Hornsea is protected by a sea wall, groynes and rock armour.

Coastal management at Withersea has tried to make the beach wider by using groynes, and also uses a seawall to protect the coast.

Mappleton is protected by rock groynes.

Spurn Head is protected with groynes and rock armour.

There has been an increase in erosion at Great Cowden because of the groynes used in Mappleton. This has led to farms being destroyed by the erosion and the loss of 100 chalets at the Golden Sands Holiday Park.

Some people disagree with where the sea defences are located, especially if it means the land in their community is not protected.

Some sea defences negatively impact tourism and reduce the amount of money coming in to the area.

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Coastal management case study: Holderness coastline - Coastal management - AQA - GCSE Geography Revision - AQA - BBC Bitesize

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The Holderness coastline is located on the east coast of England. It is the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. The coastline is rapidly eroding at an average of 1.8 metres a year. There are several reasons why the coast at Holderness is eroding so quickly: - the cliffs are made from less-resistant boulder clay (made from sands and clays) which slumps when wet.

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Coastal Processes and Coastal Management GCE

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Managing the Dorset Coast: Conflicts, Challenges and Opportunities (Preview)

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For more information please go to: http://www.pumpkin-interactive.co.uk/collections/geography/products/managing-the-dorset-coast-conflicts-challenges-and-opportunities Dur: 41 minutes / Year: 2012 / KS: 3 - 5 How can you balance the needs of the 25,000 visitors who descend on Studland Bay on a busy day, meet the requirements of Europe's largest oil field and protect the environment?

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creating the perfect beach hut for studland

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creating the perfect beach hut for studland

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The future beach hut: the story at Studland. This video from the National Trust explains how students from the Arts university Bournemouth have been challenged with designing a 'future proof' beach hut. They must be in keeping with the local environment, withstand extreme weather and create an enjoyable beach hut experience - all without costing the Earth!

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tourist video of amazing wildlife at Studland

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tourist video of amazing wildlife at Studland

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Amazing wildlife of Studland Bay, Dorset

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who should have the largest say in how Studland is managed?

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Paddling ashore, I pull my dinghy up the beach then stroll up through the woods to Studland's village pub. Among the trees higher up the hill are a couple of hundred houses, a post office and a hotel. It is rural England at its most romantic, and a million visitors a year cram the National Trust car-parks along the shore.

But this lovely scene of blue water and green hills is not all it seems. The most popular open anchorage on the entire coast is the focus of a bitter struggle in which it is said that powerboats have deliberately run at divers, yachtsmen have threatened to 'shoot all conservationists on sight', a scientific experiment has been sabotaged, and fury has erupted on websites between 'arsehole villagers', 'green frauds' and 'rich yachties'.

On one side of this battle for Studland Bay is an unlikely alliance. There is the armada of up to 300 boats that invade the bay on sunny summer weekends, people who want to splash around in smooth water or, like me, to dodge a contrary tide or foul weather by anchoring in the only sheltered bolthole available between Weymouth and the Solent. And there are the villagers, who support the weekend boaters because they hate the idea of regulations that stop people enjoying the place. They also want to continue using moorings in the bay for their own boats.

On the other side are conservationists and a community of cute, delicate creatures with long snouts and revolving eyes, their curly tails clinging to long blades of eelgrass growing in meadows just beneath the boats' keels - seahorses. The issue is whether anchoring in the bay should be banned to protect the seahorses' habitat.

The furore is more than a simple matter of conservation. It is establishing precedents in the Government's plan to 'manage' much of the coast for the benefit of 'features of conservation interest' - the seahorses of Studland Bay, for example.

Facing up to its international and EU obligations, the Government is creating a network of Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) along the coast of England (Scotland and Wales have their own plans). For three years, four regional projects have been working with local sea users to identify sites where 'nationally important' wildlife and habitats require protection.

Dorset fell under the wing of Finding Sanctuary, which covers the shore from Bournemouth to Bristol. Its project manager, Tom Hooper, says the views of no fewer than 240,000 stakeholders - fishermen, divers sailing clubs, bird-watchers, wildlife trusts, gravel dredgers, wind farmers, marinas - have been gathered.

Days of long-winded meetings have resulted in 43 potential MCZs being agreed and mapped out. Details will be delivered to the Government on August 1, and after three months of consultation the final zones will be declared next spring. Of these MCZs, 13 will be 'reference areas' allowing no human activities. One of these, initially at least, was to be Studland Bay.

The Studland controversy was born one summer day in 2004 when a scuba-diver called Julie Hatcher finned slowly over the waving fronds of eelgrass in the bay with her partner, Steve Trewhella. Both are avid naturalists. Hatcher is the Dorset Wildlife Trust's awareness officer, Trewhella a marine photographer, and they live in the next village.

Hatcher signalled towards something moving in the grass and it took a while for Trewhella to see what had caught her interest. A 6in stick-like object covered with greeny spines had turned its back as if trying to make itself invisible and was slowly moving away - a seahorse!

What's not to like about seahorses? Demure little creatures, they waft through the vegetation in a delightfully coy head-down posture propelled by a fluttering fin on their backs. Like chameleons they change colour and their eyes revolve independently. Moreover, seahorses are the only species in which the male fertilises and nurses eggs in his pouch, and this one had a bulging belly - he was pregnant.

The pair alerted the Seahorse Trust. Soon its divers had identified as many as 40 individual seahorses that disappeared into deep water to avoid winter storms but returned every summer to breed. 'There's no question that Studland Bay is a site of worldwide importance,' Neil Garrick-Maidment, who runs the trust, announced.

As the high priest of seahorses, Garrick-Maidment, 52, looks the part with his big frame, goatee beard and sepulchral voice. He fell in love with the creatures as a schoolboy in Malta where his father was in the RAF. He went on to join the marine staff at Paignton Zoo, took on the breeding of seahorse species from all over the world, and set up and ran a seahorse aquarium on Exeter Quay.

Along with whales and pandas, seahorses have long been iconic but little was known about them. Ancient Picts had carved them in stone and fishermen found them in nets, but in Britain they were thought to be accidental visitors. Intrigued by a photo of seahorses in Jersey in 1994, Garrick-Maidment resolved to find out more and launched the British Seahorse Survey. Hundreds of sightings reported by divers, fishermen and naturalists produced an unexpected picture. Britain's two species were found not only in Studland but in nearly all coastal waters. They were up the Thames, the Solent and Tamar; children even netted half a dozen of them from pontoons in a Jersey marina.

The survey evolved into the Seahorse Trust, run by Garrick-Maidment with 'hundreds' of volunteers. The trust's president, Nick Baker, plus three of its four patrons - Kate Humble, Chris Packham and Mark Carwardine - are BBC wildlife presenters. Its first move was to put up a case for extra protection of seahorses and in 2008 both species were listed under the Wildlife and Countryside Act as 'threatened'. This means that they are legally protected in the same way as bats and otters, and habitats must be protected as well.

Two years ago the trust was granted £42,000 of lottery funds to tag Studland seahorses with little numbered necklaces and study their behaviour. BBC news reports sprouted headlines such as 'Fragile seahorse habitats at risk'. 'If Studland Bay were on land it would have a big fence around it with no public access,' Garrick-Maidment says. 'It's sad that authorities don't live up to their duty to police the bay.'

There is no evidence that seahorses in Britain are declining, because numbers are not known. Nobody is harvesting them for aquaria or Chinese medicine, as in the Far East where many thousands are taken every year. The main problem is their habitat. Eelgrass is not a seaweed, but the only flowering plant found beneath the sea's surface. Large beds extend along much of the British coast, but worldwide it is under pressure from many human activities such as fertiliser run-off and dredging. It is a nursery for many other species and protects beaches from erosion.

'In marine terms,' Trewhella says, 'it's more important than rainforest.'

Studland's eelgrass meadow faces two threats - the swinging chains of up to 51 moorings laid by villagers and the hundreds of anchors of visiting boats. Both are said to damage eelgrass and, therefore, seahorses. 'They create desert conditions,' Trewhella says. 'We have dived all over it and verified that the bare areas are getting bigger.'

Garrick-Maidment is scathing about the motor-boaters he calls the 'Birmingham navy', who know little about seamanship and winch up anchors festooned with tangled roots of eelgrass. One day, when he was scuba-diving, a speedboat even tried to tie up to the float Garrick-Maidment was trailing to indicate his position. Others are said to have ignored shouted warnings and aimed deliberately at divers.

Trewhella, 47, makes no bones about stirring the hornets' nest. 'Eelgrass is as important to seahorses as jungle is to orang-utans, and I don't believe its fate should lie in the hands of villagers who are mostly second-home owners down from London and have never been locals,' he says. In fact, the parish says only a quarter of its houses are second homes or rentals.

Seahorses and their habitats are officially protected, the conservationists say, so why is nothing being done? Studland has the biggest concentration of seahorses found so far in Britain and is their only known breeding site, offering a unique chance to study them in the wild.

'We usually find 40 a year but if the site were pristine and healthy we'd see 200, suggesting they are in serious trouble,' Garrick-Maidment says. 'We're not trying to be killjoys. Boats are welcome but anchoring must be banned.'

One compromise might be eco-friendly moorings that rise and fall with the tide but don't damage vegetation. They are used in other parts of the world such as France and Florida. 'In any civilised society they'd be seen as the perfect solution,' Trewhella says.

Villagers woke up to what was happening in their bay when the Dorset Wildlife Trust submitted an article to the parish magazine, edited by Toni Ives. The trust floated the idea of leasing the bay from the Crown Estate, its owner, so it could control mooring and anchoring. Horrified, Ives alerted her brother Mike Potter, a retired engineer living over the road, and telephones started to ring.

Meeting in the Bankes Arms, the village pub, a score of residents formed a task force called the Studland Bay Protection Association. Coordinator Nick Warner, 65, a burly, ruddy-faced figure who has fished the bay commercially since he left the Army 15 years ago, says, 'If anchoring or any other activity were really hurting the bay we'd be the first to object, but every day we can see the eelgrass expanding and coming closer to the beach.'

He acknowledges that some mooring chains do scour the seabed. 'But all these areas added together amount to a small fraction of the 250 acres of eelgrass. In fact some moorings in place for 50 years have been enveloped in eelgrass. There's a web of intent among certain groups to take over the bay and manage it. We say it doesn't need managing and should be free for everyone to enjoy.'

Upset by Trewhella's Facebook comments about 'arsehole villagers', Robin Hilton, 75, the former parish clerk, ran a survey overseen by the vicar to find out what the 394 voters in the village really wanted. Of 177 replies, nearly 40 per cent wanted no change and 37 per cent wanted any action limited only to control of scallop-dredging or trawling; 22 per cent wanted an MCZ with restrictions on anchoring.

The villagers are also opposed to eco-friendly moorings. 'They are expensive, need to be lifted for maintenance every year, and boat insurers have to approve them,' Warner says. 'Above all, there is no demonstrated need for them - the eelgrass is in good shape and so are seahorses.'

A third squadron came, guns blazing, over Studland's horizon. Watching a BBC nature programme, Stephen Price sat up with a jolt when he saw Kate Humble declare that anchoring in Studland would be banned to save seahorses.

A 59-year-old printer who cruises the south coast with his wife in their yacht, Galadriel, Price logged on to Scuttlebutt, a forum for yachtsmen run by a sailing magazine. 'Have you guys seen this?' he posted. 'Looks like we'll be banned from Studland - and haven't we been anchoring there since Noah got his Yachtmaster ticket?'

The news kicked off a storm, and Trewhella joined the forum to fight the seahorse corner. Many of the hundreds of postings descended into threats and abuse. One said yachties were clearly brighter people, which is why they could afford boats. Some argued that if anchors really damaged eelgrass as badly as claimed, there would be none left.

One active poster was Jon Reed, who signed himself Old Harry. A calm, white-bearded man of 65 who devoted his career to helping people with special needs, he coast-hops in his 24ft sloop, Spin, and often dodges the tide by dropping anchor in Studland.

'There's nothing I like better than watching the world go by from my cockpit, then paddling ashore for a beer,' he says. 'No sailor in his right mind drops an anchor on eelgrass because it won't hold properly, so we drive around looking for sandy spots. Every year these get harder to find - don't tell me the eelgrass is diminishing.'

Eco-friendly moorings are not a bad idea, Reed thinks, but they are expensive to install and maintain, and somebody has to pay for them. 'It would be such a shame to enjoy a hard sail into this lovely bay only to be greeted by a little man in a boat with his hand out demanding money,' he says. 'And who's going to tell the Birmingham navy streaming into the bay on a sunny weekend that all moorings are occupied so go away?'

Reed saw something more sinister developing than the simple issue of seahorses at Studland. For weeks he researched the proposed MCZs. 'The vast majority of sailing people are completely unaware of what's going on,' he says. 'MCZs will pop up where anything is deemed worthy of being conserved and each will have its own management. Our whole way of life is under threat. Popular areas of the Solent such as Osborne Bay and Newtown Creek, as well as anchorages along the coast to the Medway, the Thames and the east coast rivers are being designated MCZs so we have to be on guard - Studland is only the thin end of the wedge.'

Reed and a group of Scuttlebutters formed the Boat Owners' Response Group to represent cruising sailors and their website quickly got 25,000 hits from 7,500 boat-owners. With the villagers, they loudly accused two recent BBC nature programmes about Studland Bay of bias. In a formal complaint, Reed wrote, 'Chris Packham has taken colloquial hearsay and presented a sensationalist and completely false view in which derogatory remarks about "G&T" Sunday sailors were doubly objectionable.'

Last April Finding Sanctuary dropped its intention to make Studland a reference area, substituting a little-used part of the Fal estuary, near Falmouth. But it will still be an MCZ, where 'activities can continue as long as they do not prevent conservation objectives being achieved'. This doesn't solve anything, Reed claims. His worry is that once a heavily used bay such as Studland is designated an MCZ, its management will be reviewed every six months and new rules imposed by stealth. 'This is the sting in the tail,' he says. 'It's conservation gone bonkers.'

The hallmark of the whole argument is lack of scientific data. Locals and boaters say the eelgrass is expanding. The Seahorse Trust says it is being irreparably damaged and diminishing. Who is right? There is no hard evidence either way - nobody appears to know.

Dr John Collins of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton investigated eelgrass damage in Studland but focused only on the ways in which anchors and chains cause damage. In a BBC radio interview he said he didn't question that the eelgrass was doing well at present, but advocated caution. But in a letter to Finding Sanctuary Collins said he had looked at maps and found eelgrass has 'declined through the 1990s'. The conclusion of his research was that anchoring 'could potentially' lead to decline of eelgrass. When I suggested jocularly to Collins that true scientific understanding of Studland's eelgrass seemed to be as full of holes as the eelgrass itself he declared himself 'insulted' and cut off communication.

In an effort to get some scientific answers, the Crown Estate and the conservation watchdog Natural England have commissioned a survey in Studland Bay. On the seabed, two similar zones have been pegged out. In one, anchoring continues as usual. In the other, six buoys on the surface ask boaters not to anchor in the area between them so it can be kept pristine. The plan was for divers to make periodic fingertip searches to compare the health of the vegetation in both zones and measure the recovery rate of damaged plants. But the survey got into trouble from the start.

Last summer, the yellow buoys marking the voluntary no-anchor zone wandered all over the bay. Boats even tied up to them, and some were stolen. This summer, better markers were installed but two immediately disappeared. Protesting boats have deliberately anchored in the middle of the zone. Interim results are expected at the end of the year but they will be too late for the political decisions being taken and always open to question because the no-anchor zone seems to have been compromised.

The tide is changing. Raising anchor and hoisting sail, I resume my voyage to the Solent. The future of Studland Bay will be decided in the next few months when the Government makes its final designation of MCZs and the Marine Management Organisation takes responsibility for them. I watch as the Dorset hills vanish into the haze astern, the sound of battle in my ears.

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Sailors vs seahorses: the battle of Studland Bay

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Paddling ashore, I pull my dinghy up the beach then stroll up through the woods to Studland's village pub. Among the trees higher up the hill are a couple of hundred houses, a post office and a hotel. It is rural England at its most romantic, and a million visitors a year cram the National Trust car-parks along the shore.

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Is the National Trust letting Studland fall into the sea?

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Is the National Trust letting Studland fall into the sea?

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LITTLE can be done to save Studland Beach from crumbling into the sea, the National Trust has warned.

Beach huts at the popular site have been moved back from the water three times in the last 25 years because of coastal erosion.

The National Trust said that its focus is on nature conservation but visitors argue action should be taken now.

Nearly 200 miles of south-west England's coastline is slipping into the sea because of coastal erosion. Studland Beach, regularly voted amongst the country's top coastal spots, has been one of the hardest hit areas.

The National Trust has experimented with gabions - metal grilles filled with rocks designed to soak up the force of the waves - but they were washed away.

Now it is persevering with its policy of letting nature take its course, despite the disappearing coastline.

Spokesman Emma Wright said the National Trust is focusing on nature conservation at Studland.

She said: "Why people come here is because it is so wonderfully natural and we have some amazing species of animals, reptiles and birds here.

"So we don't want to put lots of structures in place which are going to detract from the nature of the area."

But she admitted the beach huts could not feasibly be moved back from the shoreline yet again.

"You come for your summer holidays, you want to be on a sandy beach," she added.

"Once that sandy beach is no longer there you don't want to be sat in the car park."

Clive Arnold, who regularly visits the beach with his family, is among those calling for action.

Groynes, designed to slow down longshore drift and build up the beach, could be installed but they typically need replacing every 15 to 20 years.

Mr Arnold said: "I think some drastic action needs to be taken pretty soon.

"At least if you put groynes in there would be something left for the people to enjoy."

Naturists have also criticised the National Trust over its stance on Studland, which includes a nudist stretch on its 180-mile coastline.

Naturist Lee Mocklar, 36, said: "I don't think they should let the sea take away the beach and sand dunes.

"I go there at least twice a year and I enjoy the surroundings Studland Bay has to offer. It doesn't seem right that the National Trust is just going to let it just sink into the sea and not do anything about it."

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National Trust will leave Studland Beach to nature

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LITTLE can be done to save Studland Beach from crumbling into the sea, the National Trust has warned. Beach huts at the popular site have been moved back from the water three times in the last 25 years because of coastal erosion.

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She wrote these whilst talking with a ranger from Studland!