GLEN Coe: half a million. Loch Lomond: half a million. Ben Nevis: quarter of a million. If you count the number of hashtags on Instagram, these are the top places in Scotland, the most beautiful and iconic: Glen Coe, Loch Lomond, and Ben Nevis.
And fair enough, in a way. When people, including me, go to a beautiful place, their instinct is to take a picture: in the old days, it was a camera, now it’s your phone. Lots of people also put their pics on Instagram in the way they used to invite you round to show you their holiday snaps on a projector. Here’s Marjory and me by the lilo in Fuerteventura, and so on.
Nowadays it’s different. The figures for Glen Coe, Loch Lomond and Ben Nevis come from research that was done by a travel website called My Voyage Scotland. The people behind the site say they analysed millions of hashtags to discover which Scottish locations were the most favourable on social media.
The results of their research will probably not surprise you. As well as the ones I’ve already mentioned, there’s also the Cairngorms, Glenfinnan Viaduct, Lochs Fyne, Tay, Leven and Ness of course, and Dunnottar Castle in Aberdeenshire. My favourite? Dunnottar. Even though I haven’t seen all the castles in the world, I can confidently say Dunnottar is more beautiful than all of them.
But I do have a few worries about lists like this, and something that happened in a tiny village in Spain may help you see why. The village is called Siurana. It is beautiful. Some say it’s one of the most beautiful villages in Spain. Indeed, an organisation called Spain’s Most Beautiful Villages wanted to put Siurana on their list. The village mayor said no.
Some people have suggested that, as a representative of a Catalan separatist party, the mayor didn’t want Siurana to be associated with Spain (politics like that is sure to make Scots feel right at home). But another possible explanation is the village didn’t want to make the kind of changes Spain’s Most Beautiful Villages were demanding – things like more space for cars, cashpoint machines and better phone coverage (so people can put the village on Instagram presumably).
This is basically the kind of effect lists of this nature have: in focusing people/travellers/tourists on particular places, they start to change the place they’re focusing on. You can see it at The Fairy Pools on Skye, another place that often makes the Instagram list. Two new bridges are about to be built there to cope with the number of visitors. Last year it was a new 140-space car park. It’s the pain of being beautiful.
But all those Instagram/Most Beautiful lists have another effect too, which is to focus visitors on a narrow number of places to the exclusion of other destinations that can be just as interesting. And so I have a short list of my own. It’s just a few places in Scotland you might not have thought to visit. Just promise me this: if you go to any of them, do not put pictures on Instagram. Thankyou.
1: Loch Doon
Loch Ness. Yup. Loch Fyne. Whatever. Try Loch Doon in Ayrshire instead. Take the extraordinary walk through the valley, then up the hill and on towards the fort. Check out the webcam trained on the osprey nest. Check out the chips in the café. Or visit at night and experience the darkest place in Scotland.
2: Thurso to Tongue
Go north. Really north. The northest of north. You may ask: where are the trees? But I would say: take the road from Thurso to Tongue and realise that you don’t know all of Scotland until you’ve experienced its rough, ragged edge.
3: Wigtownshire
Books, books, books. You’ve got to go to the book town of Wigtown. Then push further west to Monreith, the home of the naturalist Gavin Maxwell – no wonder he loved Scotland’s coast so much.
4: The Southern Upland Way
What a walk. The highest village in Scotland: Wanlockhead. The village with the best pub food in Scotland: Sanquhar. And the greatest joy of all: meandering along, under and over Scotland’s belt. No Instagram required.
Read more by Mark Smith:
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