Abstrakt
Educational trails represent an important source for studying how the meaning of landscape is negotiated. In our chapter, we analyse the changes between two versions of an educational trail titled Glassmaking in the vicinity of Lesná village located in the western border region of the Czech Republic.
The idea of "the contact zone" has been conceptualised by Richard E. Miller (1994) to represent a local forum which exists as a series of local negotiations.
In such a sense, the educational trails can be understood as a representation and materialization of the contact zone. The two versions of the trail we analysed were built in 2000/2001 and 2015.
The former was made by the Lesná village council while the latter by the Protected Landscape Area of Upper Palatine Forest. We understand the panels of the educational trail to represent materialized stages of the contact zone; they exhibit stable as well as changing topics in the understanding of the landscape and its history in the period between the beginning of 2000s and the present.
We argue that the changes in the topics and to the trail can be linked to the emergence of a new institutional actor in the region - the Protected Landscape Area of Upper Palatine Forest - and the change of the tourist expectations.