Environmental Scotland IV

IASSL is pleased to invite everybody interested to the next instalment of the webinar series ‘Environmental Scotland’, to be held on Monday 20 April 2026 at 5 pm UK time on ZOOM. The event will feature two talks, by Garry Mackenzie and Coinneach Maclean, and will be followed by a discussion. The series is currently facilitated by Monika Szuba (University of Gdańsk) and Petra Johana Poncarová (Charles University, Prague).

PROGRAMME

Garry MacKenzie: In this talk I will reflect on my approach to writing about two Scottish landscapes: Ben Dorain, in the West Highlands, and the Firth of Forth. Ben Dorain is the location of one of the greatest poems in Scottish Gaelic, Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s In Praise of Ben Dorain, composed orally in the eighteenth century. I will discuss how I translated this poem and incorporated it into a longer ecopoetic exploration of Highland ecology and contemporary environmental philosophy. I will then outline some of the ways in which I’ve been creating a new, poetic portrait of the ecological and social history of the Firth of Forth, drawing on glaciology, marine ecology, social history and recent environmental concerns including plastic pollution. I will conclude by considering how distinctly Scottish places and literary traditions might be brought into conversation with global environmental issues and contemporary ways of thinking about the world we live in.

Coinneach Maclean: Tourism in Scotland has a powerful marketing brand, the kilted Highlander in a mountain landscape. Literary discourse views this image as false, distorting and displacing a more authentic image of the nation. The pervasiveness of this discourse substitutes for a reasoned examination of the impact of mass tourism on the landscape and culture of Gaelic Scotland. This paper looks in more detail at the current tourism narratives of ‘wilderness’, the conjuring of new meaning for ancient place-names, the construction of new narratives based on such musing, the failure to understand the nature of older landscape narrative, and finally considers the context for the ‘academic’ positioning of Scotland as the prime site of the ‘Invention of Tradition’.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Garry MacKenzie is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Fife. His book-length poem Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain (2021) is published by The Irish Pages Press. Combining a free translation of Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s eighteenth-century Gaelic poem In Praise of Ben Dorain with original material on themes including ecological science and the politics of land use, Ben Dorain was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award. His non-fiction book Scotland: a Literary Guide for Travellers was published by I.B. Tauris in 2016. Garry has also published three pamphlets with Clutag Press and Wind&Bones, collaborated with visual artists and filmmakers, and had his work adapted for BBC radio. He teaches literature and creative writing on a freelance basis and is an Associate Lecturer (lifelong learning) at the University of St Andrews. His next collection Firth, a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth, will be published in early summer 2026.

Coinneach Maclean is from the island of South Uist and is now retired from full-time employment and trusteeships. Although he initially trained as an archaeologist at Edinburgh and Cambridge universities, he has had a diverse career latterly as a qualified tourist guide. This field has provided further insight into the treatment of indigenous cultures at the hands of the mass tourism industry. Coinneach has successfully defended a doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Tourist Gaze on Gaelic Scotland’ and authored two books in 2025: Travels in Another Country, a guide to Gaelic Scotland and An t-Eilean, Skye Places and People.