The Brecon Beacons wants fewer tourists. Head to these beauty spots instead

Another week, another special place succumbs to overtourism.

Visitors to Bannau Brycheiniog National Park – also known as the Brecon Beacons – are being urged to go outside peak times and to use buses to take the pressure off footpaths, car parks, photogenic sites and local amenities.

Social media “influencers” posting images of Pen y Fan – Wales’s highest summit – and the so-called Waterfall Country hiking area in Ystradfellte, Powys have led to a surge in numbers, creating crowds as well as traffic and parking problems.

About four million people visit the national park every year. The park authority says it doesn’t want to deter tourists, but is encouraging them to visit outside peak times.

Rangers also report some visitors arriving unprepared, with extra staff being taken on to ensure those who set out on walks inside the park have adequate footwear and clothing. South East Wales is one of the wettest places in the UK and the weather in the uplands is particularly fickle.

But so are Instagrammers, and no amount of earnest advice is likely to deter box-tickers, selfie-addicts and cliché-collectors.

A fact often overlooked is that the eastern end of the Bannau Brycheiniog is the closest mountainous area to London – the epicentre of the youthful e-generation.

If you want to avoid the hordes and the hassle, why not consider these options?

The western Brecon Beacons: the Carmarthen Fans

Just 20 miles and an hour’s drive from the influencer-addled summits of Pen y Fan and Fan y Big are the serene solitudes of the western Brecon Beacons. Overlooked, like so much of Carmarthenshire, they contain a couple of impressive peaks – Fan Brycheiniog and Picws Du are the two highest points in the Black Mountain area (not to be confused with the Black Mountain/Black Mountains on the English-Welsh border).

Llyn y Fan Fach is a beautiful lake overlooked by Picws Du and other prominent mountains, and the walk from the car park at Llandeusant is popular but not pullulating with kitless kids shooting videos. Fforest Fawr, which comprises much of this area, is a 300-square-mile Unesco Geopark. Some 480 million years of geological history are contained in its rocky layer-cake, and the area is also a bridge between rural mid-Wales and the post-industrial Valleys.

Llandovery, Llandeilo and Carmarthen – Roman Moridunum – are excellent bases for touring and exploring the Carmarthen Fans.

Caithness and Sutherland: the UK’s newest Unesco site

The Flow Country, the largest area of blanket bog on earth, was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in July.

It might not look easy to explore a flattish, sponge-like vastness, but fortunately the 168-mile Far North Line meanders through the heart of the area; the train runs on an embankment opening up vistas of glistening pools, rivulets and spongy peatland made up of sphagnum mosses, ling heather, asphodel and butterwort.

Formed over 10,000 years, the peat is up to ten metres deep. Once a battleground between pro-plantation developers and conservationists, the area is now being allowed to recover, which is good for the planet – peat is a superb carbon store – and native fauna.

Merlin, short-eared owls and golden eagles hunt over the mosses and pools. Divers, plover and greenshank feed and nest in the wetlands. Microhabitats support insects, spiders, amphibians, reptiles and small mammals like shrews.

The Flow Country covers around 1,500 square miles spread across Caithness and Sutherland, two of Britain’s least visited counties; these are the Highlands overlooked by the majority of NC500 drivers and the crowds that congregate around hotspots and honeypots like Glencoe and Loch Ness.

The RSPB maintains a visitor centre and lookout tower at Forsinard, and there are cottages, lodges and hotels dotted around the peatlands. If you want amenities and some evening action, Wick and Thurso are welcoming, historically fascinating towns close to the coast.

Cumbrian Coast: the Lake District’s Wondrous Littoral

Cumbria! The Lakes!? Escape the tourists? It’s actually quite easy. The solution is to start in the south – which is actually Lancashire but administered by Westmorland and Furness – a unitary authority created in April 2023.

There are two ways to get there. The challenging one is to walk from Arnside on one of the regular charity hikes across Morecambe Bay – which are offered each summer. The easy option is to take a ride on the Furness Line from Lancaster and see, and perhaps stop at, Grange-over-Sands, Ulverston and Barrow-in-Furness.

The last of these has a rich industrial past and present (the Dock Museum is superb), lovely beaches on Walney Islands, a very special pub (where the landlord has the official title of King of Piel) on Piel Island, spectacular Abbey ruins and, at Swarthmoor Hall between Barrow and Ulverston, a cradle of Quaker history. To the south of Barrow rises Black Combe, a 1,970-foot fell that rises almost directly from the sea.

From here, the scenic Cumbrian Coast Line continues along an under-touristed stretch. The views on the right-hand side are classic Lakeland: mountains, sheep, moody weather, glaciated valleys.

On the left is the sea, sandy beaches and clear skies, and tiny settlements tourists never get around to overwhelming. Nethertown and Braystones evolved out of temporary camps made for military and, later, Sellafield contractors. Whitehaven is a pretty harbour town with cool cafés and restaurants, the Beacon Museum, and Moresby Hall Hotel – a Grade I-listed, 17th-century country house and B&B.

The residents of Whitehaven call the residents of Workington “jam-eaters”. The residents of Workington call the residents of Whitehaven… “jam-eaters”.

The term goes back to mining days, when, it is claimed, colliers who couldn’t afford to buy meat for the sandwiches in their snap tin had to make do with jam butties. So lots of jam, but not much traffic.

Durham Heritage Coast: post-industrial paradise

Tourist boards often divide walks up into categories like nature, city, wildlife and history. The great thing about the path along the Durham Heritage Coast – part of the never-quite-finished England Coast Path – which links Hartlepool in County Durham, and Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, is that it covers all bases.

Formerly a centre of coal mining, the area has been beautified and landscaped, with monuments along the way as well as scars and geological reminders of the long history of exploitation and development.

It’s worth taking a look around the two towns, but the Durham Coastal Footpath proper is an 11-mile walking route between Seaham and Crimdon. Blackhall Rock beach featured in the climactic and bloody closing scenes of the 1971 Michael Caine film Get Carter.

In the film, the beach is littered with sea coal; black staining is evident in some areas. At North Sands beach – which is easy to walk along at low tide – is wooden Steetley Pier, a remnant of the magnesite industry.

Several former colliery towns lie on the route, including Blackhall, Horden and Easington – the last pit to be closed in this area, and the setting for the film Billy Elliot.  Where once there were slagheaps and headstocks are now meadows filled with orchids and poppies and, beyond these, fields of oilseed rape and wheat. Along the shore are protected nesting areas for little terns. Skylarks serenade walkers all along the trail. It’s enough to make you pirouette and stand en pointe.

When you finally arrive in Sunderland, or Hartlepool – depending on your preferred direction – you can’t help but be amazed at how much England has changed in the last half century.

The loss of industry is sad and the impact devastating, but the native beauty of the region is undeniable. Hartlepool-born author Compton Mackenzie once said: “Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie. Never walk when you can ride.” Ignore him when you come to the paradisiacal North East.

Shropshire Hills: beautiful Border Country

Every time an Olympics rolls around, there’s a mini boom in interest in the village of Much Wenlock, said to be the home of the modern Games. But then Shropshire fades back into happy oblivion again, ignored by the Snowdonia-bound, and the beach-loving crowds aiming for Barmouth and Pembrokeshire. Landlocked has never been well loved in the UK.

Tony Wilson is reputed to have said: “Manchester is different.” Shropshire certainly is. It has no cities, is one of England’s most sparsely-populated counties (a mere 136 souls per square kilometre) and a quarter of its land is a protected National Landscape – encompassing the Shropshire Hills, an idyllic liminal zone between the Midlands and Wales.

For your first taste of this rugged spine, test your mettle on the Clee Hills, which rise due east from Ludlow. Brown Clee Hill is the highest point in Shropshire. It’s a steep walk or cycle, but the views from the top are stunning.

The uncrowded Shropshire Way starts immediately behind Ludlow Castle; a path tracks the River Onny for 11 miles to Craven Arms, passing Stokesay, where the fortified 13th-century manor house of Laurence of Ludlow emerges from a bend in the river like a prop from Lord of the Rings.

West of Craven Arms the path winds through sheep-dotted farmland to the grass-covered whorls of the Iron Age hill-fort at Bury Ditches and on to the village of Clun, where the 11th-century motte-and-bailey castle was ransacked by Owain Glyndŵr, the last Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales.

The Long Mynd above Church Stretton can get a bit hectic, especially at weekends. Otherwise, Shropshire is undiscovered country and this National Landscape, while locally loved, an unspoiled frontier.