This article addresses the relative dearth of work on courtship and marriage motivations for early nineteenth-century England. Focusing on rural-industrial Lancashire, the article draws on a rare conjunction of sources: an autobiography, a series of love-letters and letters from friends, relating to the nascent textile entrepreneur David Whitehead and his intended wife Betty Wood. Triangulating these sources suggests that some of the seemingly dominant influences on courtship and marriage seen in other studies, such as the economic status of partners, family and kin, had little part in this drama. Rather, issues of love, destiny and, above all, religious suitability dictated the pace, content and outcome of the courtship process. Against this backdrop, it was Betty Wood, rather than David Whitehead, who held the levers of power in the courtship. The article also explores other aspects of courtship, most especially the relationship between courtship intensity/fragility and the spatial dynamics of the marriage market.

After reviewing the development of wire fencing in Great Britain and the United States of America in the early nineteenth century, I examine the introduction of wire into Australia using published sources only. Wire was available in the colonies from the early 1850s. The earliest published record of a wire fence was on Phillip Island near Melbourne (Victoria) in 1842. Almost a decade passed before wire was used elsewhere in Victoria and the other eastern colonies. Pastoralists either sought information on wire fences locally or from agents in Britain. Local agents of British companies advertised in colonial newspapers from the early 1850s, with one exceptional record in 1839. Once wire was adopted, pastoralists rejected iron posts used in Britain, preferring cheaper wood posts cut from the property. The most significant innovation was to increase post spacings with significant cost savings. Government and the iron industry played no part in these innovations, which were achieved through trial-and-error by pastoralists. The large tonnages of wire imported into Australia and the increasing demand did not stimulate local production of wire, and there were no local wire mills until 1911.

The Access to Mountains Act of 1939 has been ridiculed for the most part as a capitulation to landed interests. Closer reconstruction of the circumstances in which such a legislative attempt was made to extend the public recreational-use of uncultivated countryside emphasises the severe limitations of a Private Members’ Bill. Even greater skills were called for in securing sufficient consensus among the various parliamentary lobbies to convince ministers that there was sufficient accord to merit the use of legislative time and resources to expedite enactment. The Act's achievement was to ratchet forward both ramblers’ expectations and a greater preparedness on the part of landed interests to provide the recreational opportunity anticipated by a post-war, largely urban population.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the holiday camp entrepreneur Billy Butlin agreed a secret deal to build an Admiralty training camp near Pwllheli in North Wales. The camp would be transferred to Butlin at the end of the war for use as a holiday camp. Whilst planners were initially horrified, the strategic argument that such camps would concentrate coastal development and also provide the necessary places for the expansion of ‘holidays with pay’ prevailed. More sustained opposition came from those concerned about the imposition of a culture of urbanised mass leisure on the Welsh heartland of the Llŷn Peninsula. For some, the threat was ‘bathing beauties’ and alcohol; more profoundly, many feared the destruction of a Welsh-speaking rural polity. National sentiment rallied around an alternative social service camp and an overt form of Welsh nation-building. Nonetheless, Butlin won the case and the holiday camp opened in 1947.

This paper examines the introduction of a novel and modern form of natural history education in Britain in the 1960s, the nature trail. The rise in the number of nature reserves owned by county conservation trusts and the Nature Conservancy after the Second World War raised the issue of how they might best be used by members of the public. Reserves were initially seen by many as places from which the public should be excluded. The American concept of Nature Trails was introduced by a powerful group of nature conservationists to raise the profile of nature conservation and educate people. The role of the two National Nature Weeks of 1963 and 1966 is examined. The paper concludes with a detailed case study of the planning and management of the nature trail at East Wretham Heath, Norfolk.