As someone who has never been to Ireland and just going off of what I know from the internet, Ireland does look visually appealing with regards to its hills and shores but thats really it. Compared to many other countries, Ireland would look more "dull" if we're going by nature. I'd love to visit Ireland but more so for the culture for instance but not really for the countryside unless it was to check out some isolated village
What is strange is that I did some digging and money.co.uk has a methodology to determine what is natural beauty, which Forbes then copied to write a clickbait article (which the quiz cites).
The man who wrote the article took the number of volcanoes, mountains, coral reefs, protected areas, coastline, rainforests and glaciers per 100,000 km squared and took the average of the all seven figures to get a score out of ten. He did the same for every country in the world, I presume.
All in all, it's flawed and favours smaller countries with very specific geography. I do find it funny how someone came up with such a precise methodology however.
I hate these types of lists b/c they are usually so random. I think it should be created based on diversity of landscapes / views. For instance, countries like China, India, and the USA, which all have super diverse (and amazing) landscapes and biomes should be higher up (according to my perspective), whereas countries like Iceland and Japan, while very beautiful, might rank a bit lower due to having less diverse landscapes.
I'm really scratching my head at what criteria they possibly used to come up with it...
The man who wrote the article took the number of volcanoes, mountains, coral reefs, protected areas, coastline, rainforests and glaciers per 100,000 km squared and took the average of the all seven figures to get a score out of ten. He did the same for every country in the world, I presume.
All in all, it's flawed and favours smaller countries with very specific geography. I do find it funny how someone came up with such a precise methodology however.