Thanks to social media, once little-known beauty spots are now international attractions, enticing hordes of visitors. Are the crowds spoiling these special places? Richard Baynes investigates
Richard Baynes is a multi-media freelance journalist based in Glasgow who specialises in the outdoors and the environment. He develops content for radio, newspapers, online and TV.
The steep, soft red sandstone is blazed with green; the peaty water is like wine on the rock. We plunge over waterfalls into deep pots, swim through the slot of the 24-metre gorge, climb rough steps out and return on a faint path through quiet woods above, no one else in sight. This is Finnich Glen, my local beauty spot, 10 years ago.
Fast forward to 2023. The rock and water are the same, but add booze bottles, discarded clothes and litter. More than 70,000 visitors a year now descend on the site in Stirlingshire, which has no car park, proper paths, or pavement along the busy A809. Many scramble down steps, now dangerously collapsed, wearing sandals and town wear. Rock features are smashed, woodland undergrowth trampled to mud. There have been threats to the owner, fences kicked down, trees axed, parking chaos, sheep killed by dogs, fields used as toilets.
Visits surged to Finnich Glen in 2014 when it featured in plaid-and-passion TV series Outlander, but that’s not why it has become a blot on the landscape. Talking to visitors now, I hear one main reason they come: social media. There are 21,000 Instagram posts hashtagged Devil’s Pulpit, the other name for the gorge. A picture of a smiling couple here gets 300 likes, a dramatic snap 4,000. TikTok videos of the gorge get thousands of likes; there are piles of tweets on X. Finnich Glen is being viewed by millions of people.
Local beauty spots all over the UK, dramatic backdrops for selfies and videos, have felt the full force of sites such as Instagram and TikTok: the Trinnacles in the Peak District, Waterfall Country in Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecons Beacons) National Park, Isle of Skye’s Fairy Pools and plenty more all face problems with accidents, dangerous parking, litter and erosion.
Dr Lauren Siegel of the University of Greenwich studies ‘Instagrammable’ destinations and says: “Social media has had an especially big impact on more rural and more ‘undiscovered’ places such as Finnich Glen
