“I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” Lord Byron once said. Just over a decade ago a secluded avenue of ancient beech trees in rural north Antrim, in Northern Ireland, experienced something similar. For two and a half centuries, the “Dark Hedges” lining a narrow road were known to only a few. The trees had been planted before Byron was born. They were mere saplings when the first shots were fired in the American Revolution.

Beeches are slow to grow, but by the 20th century scores of smooth-barked giants lined the Bregagh Road, creating an atmospheric tunnel. Their thick interlocking branches twisted up to the heavens like contorted fingers. This dramatic setting drew the makers of “Game of Thrones”, a sex-and-dragons TV fantasy, who used the scene to represent the Kingsroad. Although the trees were only briefly on screen, the HBO blockbuster made them famous.

Celebrity was initially welcomed. The Northern Ireland Tourist Board promoted the attraction and put up signs to help people find them. Fans of the show poured in from around the world. But in doing so, they hastened the decline of the thing they had come to admire. Traffic jams on the tiny country road meant that cars and coaches pulled up on the banks, churning the soil to mud, compacting the earth and damaging shallow roots. The trees were potentially coming to the end of their natural lives anyway. But instead of careful management, they got Instagram likes.

Six years ago traffic was banned from the road. But that measure hasn’t been enforced. Meanwhile age and weather continue to take their inevitable toll. Branches have sheared off and storms have uprooted entire trees. Where once there were more than 150 gnarled specimens, now just 86 remain.

Bob McCallion has been photographing the beeches for 45 years; his images have won myriad awards. He believes they are now so dangerous that people shouldn’t be walking beneath them. “Tourism is taking precedence over public safety. Those responsible should hang their heads in shame,” he said. On November 20th teams arrived to chop down another six trees because they were unsafe.

Nine miles away on Ireland’s north coast lies another dramatic tourist attraction, the Giant’s Causeway. “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see,” Samuel Johnson famously, and harshly, said of the hexagonal basalt columns. Soon enough that will be true of the Dark Hedges. ■