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Our starting point in conducting our research into aspects of heritage and atrocity was that some common threads could be drawn between sites and events of the last hundred years, which had either been the locations of death and disaster or sites of interpretation of such events for visitors. In constructing a vocabulary for these sites and locations, the use of the term'tourist attraction'represented both a judgement about the motives and rationales for making the site available to the public and a commentary upon the experiences of visitors. We regarded it as unacceptable that we should proceed from either of these prejudices without any substantive foundation and concluded that we needed a label for this phenomenon which could both describe it and allow us to conduct fieldwork without fear of misunderstanding. That is not to say that some of these sites are not'attractions' in the tourism sense, simply that we found …