The Tragedy of the Picturesque

Honeypot sites and the tragedy of the commons

Photo by Shlomo Shalev on Unsplash

Imagine the scene: it’s a bank holiday weekend, the sun is liberally dispensing its blissful rays, and, unusually for Britain, the temperature is hovering around that coveted ‘Goldilocks degree’ where everyone is happy: not too hot, not too cold — it is just right. Fortuitously, you are on holiday in the vicinity of the English Lake District: 912 square miles of utter sublimity where ancient farming traditions have worked the rugged mountains — with their accompanying valley-filling lakes — into some the most cherished and spectacular landscapes on the face of this earth.

Like any rational tourist, you decide that today is the perfect day to sample the delights of one of the Lake District’s most famous beauty spots: Wordsworth’s beloved Rydal Water; the quaint, picture-postcard village of Grasmere with its famous gingerbread shop; or somewhere along Windermere’s expansive lakeside shore. Or, if something wilder takes your fancy, you could visit Aira Force, a spectacular waterfall gushing deep within a thickly wooded valley. And, of course, you could always ascend the highest peak in the district, Scafell Pike, to enjoy unrivalled panoramic views of England, Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland. You are spoilt for choice in this veritable land of wonders.

But before you pack your bags and head out, there is something I must tell you. If you are wishing to experience the wonder of the Lake District at its finest (or any other well-known picturesque landscape for that matter), my advice to you is simple: “Whatever you do, don’t go to the famous beauty spots”. Not during the peak season, that is.

In offering this solemn and somewhat surprising advice, my intention is not to be some grumpy killjoy who wants to banish tourists from the face of the earth. No, for I, too, am an eager visitor to picturesque landscapes and natural features. Rather, my intention, as paradoxical as it sounds, is to save you from being disappointed.

I should further clarify that I am not saying “don’t go” because these sites are not worth your time. They are beautiful; they are sublime; they are absolutely worth seeing. You will miss out for not going. But you will also miss out if you decide to go. Miss out, that is, in a deeper, more profound manner whereby one forgoes experiencing the essence of a place at its finest.

I say all this, for where the “honey” is, the crowds are sure to follow…

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The Lake District’s most famous locations are classic examples of what geographers aptly label ‘honeypot sites’. Honey is sweet, aromatic, and delightful to the tastebuds; honeypot sites likewise are a feast for the eyes — places blessed with astounding natural beauty that are also (and this is crucial) accessible to the masses and/or well-known. Whenever the sun is shining, a beauty-seeking mass pilgrimage is triggered every weekend and bank holiday as streams upon streams of day trippers, overseas visitors, and ‘staycationers’ flock in their masses to these coveted beauty spots. Like moths to a lamp… or bees to a hive full of honey.

It is a predictable and understandable phenomenon. Tourists tend to be a bunch of like-minded folk, all with similar ideas of what, and where, makes a for a grand day out — exhibiting a kind of “day trip herd mentality”, if you will. They all tend to read the same pages of the same travel guides or put the same day-trip related search terms into the same search engine. This being so, the Law of Averages strongly implies that the majority of your fellow travellers have decided to visit the exact same picturesque location as you have. The car park will be chock-a-block, the paths crowded, and the beauty spot swamped with trendy looking visitors imposing themselves directly in front of beautiful and sublime scenery in order to get that perfect back drop for their instagram profile — ‘landscape consumerism’ at its most vain. Carving out for yourself a moment of solitary peace and quiet to give the scenery the attention and awe that beauty deserves, will be nigh on impossible. And that, my friends, is a very significant loss indeed.

Safe to say, then, that this same vanity-infused, hustle-and-bustle scene, repeated across all honeypot sites up and down the country, is hardly the ideal of a grand day out, let alone picturesque paradise. Instead, it provokes that very feeling one suffers after eating too much honey: the sweetness becomes sickly; the picturesque becomes profane.¹

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A spiral of decline ensues. Not only do the crowds bring a noisy cacophony and a claustrophobic hustle-and-bustle that destroys the wild or rural essence of such places, but crowds also “necessitate” (for the bureaucrats, that is) changes to the landscape. Up go hideous and unnecessary fences and guard rails to prevent wayward tourists from “falling off”, signs are erected to “interpret” the landscape and dictate to you what is “strictly forbidden” (which is often ignored anyway), and unsightly bins are provided to contain overflowing litter. Each addition of modern infrastructure and amenities further contaminates and degrades the picturesque and its essence of the wild. Irreversible changes can also occur; ones which threaten the ecological and aesthetic integrity of the landscape itself. Footpaths and mountainsides are eroded, wildlife is scared away, rock faces crumble, and tree roots and rare wildflowers are trampled to death.

The damage is great and lasting. The sublimity of what attracted the masses may still exist, whether it be the mountain or the waterfall or something else — but it is fundamentally tainted; defamed by virtue of its own popularity. Its beauty becomes its demise.

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There is another term favoured by geographers which happens to explain why the perverse phenomenon of ‘honeypot site degradation’ all too often occurs. I argue these picturesque places suffer from a form of the dreaded ‘tragedy of the commons’, a term coined in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin.

Commons, by their very nature and purpose, are available to be used and enjoyed by all and everyone within a defined societal membership, which normally takes the form of those belonging to a particular area. A classic example can be found on the very same mountainsides of the picturesque Lake District fells. The fells are common land, available as free grazing land for local farmers to use for their flocks of Herdwick sheep. There is an owner of the common land per se, but by being members of the local community, these farmers all have a legal right to use the grazing land as commoners.

Perhaps one can perceive a potential problem here. If those who have a right to use the land do not own it (and if there are many commoners with their many sheep who have this right), what is to stop the land from being overused, and in this case, overgrazed? Surely it makes rational economic sense for each farmer to put as many sheep on the land as he is allowed in order to maximise his or her own benefit from the grazing land resource? If all your neighbours are going to do the same, refraining from doing so out of a desire for wise and sustainable use only means that you are going to miss out; someone else will simply take advantage of the share you have forsaken. No incentive exists in this system for restraint, and absolutely no incentive to improve, invest in, and protect the land, for why should another greedy commoner “free ride” of the back of your benevolence?

This is the theory anyway. In reality, a law of ‘stinting’,² which governs the size of permitted stocking densities, prevents this perverse scenario from playing out on the Lake District fells³. And even without this law, the ancient hefting system, which is utterly integral to the functioning of these upland agrarian landscapes, would unravel if the farmers became greedy. These checks and balances, coupled with the fact that a farmer who transgressed the rules of the commons would suffer a severe blow to his reputation (which is worth its weight in gold in a close-knit community) prevent the tragedy of the commons from playing out. The beauty and utility of the landscape is thus preserved for all to enjoy.

Not all commons are as well governed as the hefting system of the fells. The risk of a tragedy of the commons scenario remains a very live possibility across many other commons around the world, especially where the boundaries of who can use the commons is, well… everyone in the country or the entire world. We see this most pertinently with our seas. Somehow, a right seems to have arisen for the dumping of waste out into the seas and oceans by water companies acting on behalf of us all.⁴ In this scenario, the “resource” is the sink capacity of the ocean, which may be able to remediate limited amounts of raw sewage, but quickly becomes swamped and overloaded by our profligacy. Or, to take another maritime example, consider how the rights to fish the open ocean by all, has often resulted in collapsed fish stocks.

The tragedy of the commons thus remains a very real and very perverse risk. And it is affecting some of our most picturesque places dramatically.

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It makes rational sense, on an individualistic level, to visit honeypot sites — even at peak seasons. The pay-off is secured: you will witness sublime or beautiful landscapes, and you will tick off a place of your bucket list. You will miss out on seeing the spectacular if you don’t go. But by choosing to go — by choosing to become part of the crowd — you, and everyone around you, is contributing to the degradation of the site, be that physically with path erosion and the trampling of tree roots, or aesthetically and atmospherically, by taking away that sense of the wild and the quiet and serenity which everyone desires.

These desirable attributes of the picturesque are in effect, common “resources” that are being consumed and degraded by each and every additional member of the crowd. And like any form of overconsumption, the effects are severe. In extreme examples, the very picturesque nature of some sites can be utterly destroyed by over-tourism, or the authorities take drastic action and ban all further visitors from the site to safeguard what remains. Some of our most beautiful and cherished sites are falling victim to their very popularity. Their destruction or degradation will be an utter tragedy indeed.

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What then is there to do? Should we simply refuse to visit picturesque sites and wish everyone else would too? No. These sites are there for us to enjoy and they are absolutely with going to — but with wisdom. This means visiting outside of peak seasons, during the week, early in the morning, or when the weather is rough (though it is understandable for families with small children that this may not be possible). Another option is to seek out for yourself places that are off the tourist trail. Get out a paper map and look for hidden gems yourself: under-appreciated, unknown, or hard to reach places that you can enjoy in the sublime peace and quiet of nature. And when you discover such sites, keep the “honey” a closely guarded secret, only sharing knowledge of its existence with a select few fellow wise and discerning travellers. For the last thing the beauty of the place and its wildlife needs is for the masses to discover the honey…

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1. I am being deliberately somewhat harsh in my judgement. On the other hand, it should be celebrated that in this age of technology, so many people still wish to enjoy the wonders of the great outdoors.

2. See this article for more on Stinting: https://bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/58_1_2_Winchester_Straughton.pdf

3. Though some would disagree with this and argue that the fells are indeed overgrazed ecological wastelands. To an extent, they have a valid point; stocking densities on many of the fells are too high, not catastrophically so (in my opinion) as the detractors may suggest, but high enough to cause ecological damage.

4. The amount of sewage dumped into the sea is shocking.