PERICLES: mapping Ireland’s coastal and maritime heritage

Ireland’s unique seascapes and historically rich coastlines are being highlighted by Queen’s University Belfast in a major international coastal and maritime heritage project, PERICLES.

Preserving and Sustainably Governing Cultural Heritage and Landscapes in European Coastal and Maritime Regions is an EU-funded research and innovation project. Its overall aim is to develop a comprehensive framework to understand, preserve and make use of our maritime heritage for societal good.

Online portal
At the heart of PERICLES is an online portal to map the tangible and intangible heritage of Europe’s coastal regions and seas. As well as being a catalogue of our coastal and maritime cultural heritage assets, the portal will have many practical applications, including identifying heritage at risk, helping to integrate heritage into marine plans, and as a trigger for identifying different heritage narratives and values.

Launching the portal as a wide-scale citizen science venture, the PERICLES team hope to uncover hidden heritage and capture heritage values that haven’t before been widely documented.

In this way, the future of Ireland’s coastal and maritime heritage can be informed by the needs and values of those to whom the heritage ultimately belongs.

Citizens, stakeholders and interested parties are invited to submit contributions to the map at the ‘Scotland-Ireland’ tab in the portal.

The PERICLES team at Queen’s University Belfast would also be interested to hear from any groups wishing to collaborate with them using the portal, or who can help promote it anywhere in Ireland.