STONE RAGE!

How one man is on a mission to topple the growing rock-stacking craze that is blighting some of Britain's most beautiful spots

- By Richard Ashmore

THE hills of the Peak District are alive with the sound of an unusual kind of rock music — the clatter of one man kicking over hundreds of stone stacks built by members of the public.

Guerrilla cairns (man-made piles of stones) have been sprouting up over one of Britain's most stunning landscapes, fuelled by people's desire to share their constructions online and leave their mark on the landscape.

It's a global phenomenon, too, with the craze rocking beauty spots as far and wide as Iceland and Australia. A quick search on Instagram reveals more than 55,000 photos just this year bearing the hashtag “stone stacking”. But there's a problem. The stones people use are taken from the same beautiful environment they are visiting, often with devastating effects on wildlife, historic monuments and makeup of the land itself.

Now one man is taking a stand against the avalanche of stone stackers, and he's made it his mission to topple as many as possible. Grandad Stuart Cox, dubbed the Peak District Viking thanks to his large, distinctive, auburn beard, has become a sensation online with his videos of his cairn demolitions, which are watched by millions worldwide.

"The biggest one I've seen was about 6ft, so I was walking up on the peak and there was a small group of people who'd built this huge thing, higher than them — I'm 5ft 10ins so it was slightly higher than me — and they were just posing for pictures... and I just walked up between them all and pushed it over," says Stuart, who lives in the pretty village of Castleton at the base of a popular tourist hiking spot, the 1,696ft-high Mam Tor hill in Derbyshire's High Peak.