An Instagram Tour of Howth

Howth is a small coastal town a 30-minute bus or DART train journey away from Dublin. With spectacular views, a relatively easy yet satisfying hike (the full loop takes up to three hours) and our one day of good weather all falling together, visiting the fishing village during my recent trip to Ireland was one of the highlights of our long weekend break. And because pictures say more than a thousands words (and my Instagram posts of Oxford, Paris and Brighton have been received very well), rather than a wordy blog post – here are my Howth highlights with an Instagram tour of the beautiful coastal hike!

A Photo Tour of Colourful Notting Hill

Notting Hill is an iconic part of London. Being the star of a film by the same name and the location of the annual Carnival as well as the famous Portobello Road Market, it's a wonderful area to wander into and explore without having a destination in mind. It's vibrant neighbourhood filled with eclectic shops and a ton of independent places to pick up drinks and snacks to keep you going, making it the perfect place to spend a sunny afternoon. And with its pastel houses, eye-catching street art and flower-covered pubs, it's also very photogenic as the colours pop around every corner.

An Instagram Tour of Oxford

After my Instagram tours of Paris and Brighton, it was inevitable that I would do one of beautiful Oxford as well. The city of colleges, Narnia, Harry Potter, Middle Earth and more bookish greats (which you can read about in my Literary Guide to Oxford) is also called the city of Dreaming Spires and it's easy to see why with the beautiful college buildings seeming to go on forever as you look up and around you ♥ I shared a few of my snapshots on Instagram already but most of these are new, and I hope you enjoy them!

7 Easy Ways to Boost Your Instagram Engagement – Top Tips & Handy Apps

I've had my Instagram account since the app became available on Android but I never used it for my blog. Instead I posted very irregular random updates of my life that didn't really have any cohesiveness to it. And if there is one buzzword in the Instagram world then it's 'theme', and you should apparently have one to create a clean feed that people want to follow and engage with. With my Twitter account growing quite slowly, a little over a month ago I decided to put my efforts into Instagram instead and see if it'd be worth it. Could I grow this channel to become a valuable addition to my blog? While my audience isn't big, in one month I did grow by over 50% to 500+ followers with an engagement of 20%-30 on each photo. In this post I'll share some of my learnings and useful apps I've found, and I hope they help you grow your Instagram engagement too.

An Instagram Tour of Brighton

A few months ago I posted An Instagram Tour of Paris, which was a fun way to feature a place I had visited without getting lost in a super lengthy blog post (I know I can be wordy at times!). And since I loved my recent visit to Brighton so much it was inevitable that I would do yet another post about this colourful and eclectic seaside city. I figured doing a photographic tour would be perfect to show off the city's Eastern-inspired Royal Pavilion and famous pebble beach, and it would also give me the opportunity to share my Instagram feed with you all as I've been working hard in the last month on creating a beautiful feed and growing my channel. Enjoy! ♥

My January - April 2017 Favourites

Even though April is already nearly over, this will be my very first favourites post of 2017, oops. In all fairness though this has been an absolute whirlwind of a year so far. I don't tend to stand still too long by negatives on here when I can but after lots of stresses around family, health and work it's only now I feel I am resurfacing and getting back on track – with my blog and life in general. Because this is 4 months worth of favourites there are a bunch of them in all sort of different categories; from a TV-show addiction (hello Riverdale) to Instagram, and from making smoothies to newly discovered fashion brands. So without further ado, here are my favourites so far of the year (in no particular order, because choosing is hard).