Stourhead Sensory Trail

The National Trust and Sensory Trust are working on a trail designed to improve the visitor experience at the gardens of the Stourhead Estate in Wiltshire.

View across the water at Stourhead Estate

The brief was to design a trail to guide visitors through the garden using touch, smell, sight and hearing. Because Stourhead estate is a heritage landscape, it was important that the trail should not impact on the landscape. For that reason it was designed to rely solely on a printed guide and map, with no signage within the gardens.

The trail guide had to be written so that it could be enjoyed by a wide range of users: children, parents, groups or individuals. For this reason Sensory Trust used the Ekarv method Ekarv Method of writing readable text. We also tried to strike a balance between imparting information and allowing the visitor to explore. The last thing we wanted was for visitors to follow the trail with their noses buried in the guide. The guide should enrich the visitor experience, not act as a barrier to it!

Testing the guide at Stourhead Open Day

We tested the guide during its development, offering a draft version to visitors to Stourhead, and asking them to comment on its use. We changed many elements of the guide in response to the feedback we received from these users.

As we assembled the guide, using sensory mapping to locate areas or richness, interviewing key garden staff, and liaising with the management at Stourhead, we kept in mind the complexity of the process. The second phase of the project is to deliver a ‘guide to the guide’. This will set out the process by which other similar properties will be able to create their own guides. For this reason, we tried to keep the development process as straightforward as possible in order that it was easily replicable.

The guide is in the final stages of production and will be available, in a variety of formats, at Stourhead during summer 2004.

Note: Stourhead won an internal 'Access for All Award' for the Sensory Trail, at their recent conference.