‘Disgusting’ rubbish in Welsh cave blamed on Instagram influencers
A Welsh cave made famous on social media has been ruined by people who visited to take pictures for Instagram and then left behind excrement, luminous graffiti and mounds of rubbish, a volunteer who cleaned it up has said.
Anthony Taylor, 42, said hundreds of people had flocked to the abandoned Gaewern slate mine near Corris Uchaf, Gwynedd, to take photographs for their Instagram profiles in recent years.
The cave, which contains a heap of rusting old cars and televisions dumped when it closed in the 1970s, first became a popular selfie spot in 2019 after a visitor put it on YouTube, earning more than six million views to date.
But Mr Taylor said others following in their footsteps “destroyed” the cave by leaving behind faeces, rubber dinghies, glow sticks and bin bags they had used to keep their feet dry.
“It’s just disgusting – really sad and disheartening,” he told the BBC. “The whole reason people want to visit a place like this is because they’ve seen it on the internet and think: ‘That’s an amazing place to go and see.’ So why would you trash it?”
The scrapheap inside the old mine is a selfie hotspot because it is illuminated by shafts of sunlight at certain times of the day. “How often do you see hundreds of cars underground with lights coming onto them from the sun?” asked Mr Taylor.
He and a group of fellow volunteers spent two days cleaning up the “bizarre” cave last month, carrying out rubbish and scrubbing spray paint from the walls.
Fluorescent yellow, red, green and turquoise graffiti covered “every bit of wall” before the volunteers cleaned it.
“From about 30ft in, the spray-painting started, and it was awful,” said Mr Taylor, who is from Aberystwyth. “When you got to the end, it was just a sea of boats, inflatable dinghies everywhere. If these things keep happening, it’s going to be lost to everyone forever.”
Mr Taylor estimated that his group and another from Hell on Earth, a YouTube channel, had removed 30 discarded dinghies from the cave in total.
“Something had to be done,” Mr Taylor said. “The people that go to these places, influencers they call themselves… they go because they’ve got inherent value to them.
“Why destroy it for everyone else? They are beautiful places, and a lot of people don’t want them to be ruined. Instagram seems to be the killer of a lot of things. People turn up, take a picture and then leave.”
