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The Giant’s Causeway has faced many threats to its survival, from mythical fights between giants to coastal erosion and rising sea levels.
Now there’s a new problem.
At first, you don’t notice them but as soon as you see one, you start to see them everywhere – hundreds of them, in every fissure and crevice.
They are coins, inserted into the tiny gaps between one of Northern Ireland’s most famous and photographed natural resources, the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway.
Like the padlocks left on the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, people often leave the coins behind for love or luck.
But, like that tradition, the coins are causing problems, and now visitors are being asked to keep their spare change in their pockets.
In Paris, it has been made illegal to attach a padlock after part of the bridge collapsed in 2014.
At the Giant’s Causeway, the practice started years ago – but the caretakers for the site, the National Trust, believe it has increased significantly in scale in the last decade or so.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists and locals visit each year and only a fraction leave behind this unwanted memento.
But the coins are having a direct impact on the rocks themselves. The worst affected are the basalt columns that make up The Loom – 10 ft high leaning towers of rock.
They are a slightly lighter colour than the iconic hexagonal
The post Giant’s Causeway visitors urged not to jam coins into iconic rocks first appeared on EnviroLink Network.