Ossian, Punk Beer and Greenwash

The Landworkers Alliance and Scottish Histories of Resistance staged a land justice gathering at Brewdog’s “Lost Forest” estate at Kinrara near Aviemore on the 12th July, Col Gordon unpacks some of the issues at play.

In 1760 a book was published that would change how the world saw the Highlands. James Macpherson (1736–1796), a local schoolteacher from just near here in Ruthven, claimed he’d uncovered fragments of ancient Gàidhlig poetry composed by a third-century bard called Ossian, the last of the Fianna. These poems spoke of an ancient Gàidhealtachd in ruins – windswept, desolate, haunted by ghosts of fallen heroes. A place full of melancholy grandeur. Sublime in its emptiness. And the poems became a global sensation. Napoleon carried them into battle. Thomas Jefferson had them on his bedside table. Goethe, Burns – Europe’s great thinkers were obsessed.

But this wilderness Macpherson described wasn’t real. These hills weren’t empty and the Gàidhealtachd wasn’t some post-human ruin. Gàidhealach communities were alive. Traumatised, absolutely. But living. Just fifteen years earlier, Gàidheals had marched all the way to Derby in the last Jacobite rising. This wasn’t ancient history. It was ongoing resistance.

So why did this poetry hit such a nerve? Because the Gàidheals were no longer a military threat. The clan system had been violently dismantled. Language suppressed. Culture criminalised. The Clearances were gathering speed. And just as the real Gàidheals were being emptied by force, Macpherson’s poetry offered a Gàidhealtachd already emptied by time. Not conquered but faded. Not displaced but long dead. It made the trauma safe by pushing it into myth.

And so the first great myth of Highland wilderness wasn’t written by an outsider. It was written here. From inside the collapse. But once that myth escaped, it took on a life of its own. 

After Ossian came Walter Scott, who turned Macpherson’s ghost-haunted Gàidhealtachd into something even more marketable. Gàidhealtachd became Highland. Gàidheals became Highlanders. Scott’s novels painted these Highlanders not as rebels, but as relics. A loyal servant in tartan. A noble savage on cue. Romantic, archaic, and crucially harmless.

This was cultural transformation through storytelling. Ossian had written the Gàidheals into the distant past. Scott kept them there and sold tickets. He gave us the Highland Games. The tourist trails. The Balmoral fantasy. And Queen Victoria sealed it all with tartan and stag heads. The Highlands were no longer a land of resistance or subsistence. They became a stage – picturesque, melancholy, and empty. A stage empty of people. Empty of context. A backdrop for aristocrats and empire to play out their Highland dreams.

And that dream became the model for wilderness itself. Because this invented landscape of sublime desolation – the windswept glen, the ruined castle, the lonesome deer – didn’t stay here. It travelled. Across the Atlantic, to a new frontier, where American writers like James Fenimore Cooper picked up the Ossianic myth and applied it to Native Americans. Explicitly modelled on Scott’s version of Highlanders, in The Last of the Mohicans, Native Americans became Ossian’s kindred. The final members of a doomed and vanishing race, remembered not as neighbours, but as noble ghosts. And it was here, in this new frontier that wilderness became more than scenery. It became ideology. A beautiful silence built on someone else’s removal.

So, what happens when the myth of the Highlands lands in America? Henry David Thoreau picks it up. He’s enchanted by Macpherson’s “stern and desolate poetry.” He says Ossian speaks a “gigantic and universal language.” For Thoreau, wilderness becomes a spiritual force. A moral tonic. He famously wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

But Thoreau wasn’t talking about national parks. He was talking about a quality of being. A kind of untamed spirit he admired, especially in Indigenous people. He saw them as keepers of wildness. As holders of ancient wisdom that modern life had forgotten. But even Thoreau, for all his admiration, couldn’t imagine Indigenous people as part of the future. Their value, to him, was symbolic—their survival, aesthetic.

And this is where John Muir comes in. Muir inherits Thoreau’s reverence but turns it into landscape. For Muir, wilderness isn’t just a moral idea. It becomes physical – vast, sublime, and untouched. And that “untouched” quality? It had to be manufactured. In Yosemite. Yellowstone. Glacier. National parks were created not in wildness but through removal. Native communities were expelled, their presence denied, their practices, such as controlled burns, ignored and forgotten. As Dispossessing the Wilderness puts it –“Uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved.”

The result? A curated fiction of purity. An illusion of land as sacred only when emptied of people. Just like Macpherson’s Highlands, these new wildernesses were not ancient. They were cleared, rebranded, and sold. And that model became global. Everywhere from Patagonia to Papua, the pattern repeated – Romanticise the landscape. Remove the people. Call it protection.

So here we are – Kinrara. Just a few miles from where James Macpherson was born. Where the myth of the sublime, empty Highlands began. Where Ossian wandered through a haunted, depopulated landscape of sorrow and ruins. That was a fiction. But not an innocent one. Because even as Macpherson wrote his melancholy epic, the real Gàidheals were being emptied. The Clearances were underway. The clan system was dismantled. The Gàidheals criminalised. And the version of the Highlands that took root in the British imagination – Romantic, ruined, noble, and lost helped make all that seem natural.

That same pattern is alive today. Because now folk like BrewDog are telling their own story of wilderness. They call this place the “Lost Forest”. Thousands of acres fenced off. Marketed as restoration. Sold as carbon credits. This is rewilding for shareholders – wilderness as brand asset. And just like before, it only works if the land appears empty. Not just ecologically degraded but culturally erased. We hear this kind of language often invoked. We’re told environments such as these are “blank canvases”. No memories held of shielings. No trace of connections or commons. No mention of the violence that made this land available in the first place.

What Ossian was to Enlightenment nostalgia, the “Lost Forest” is to climate capitalism, a vision of Highland emptiness that says more about the storyteller than the land itself.

But Macpherson wasn’t a Londoner imagining the distant Highlands. He was a Highlander, writing from inside collapse. Ossian might not be history, but it is grief. It’s an elegy for a world slipping away and it’s told in a mythic and storytelling tradition that is native to Gàidheals. That’s something to wrestle with. 

Because what if part of our task now is not just to expose the fictions of the stories we are being sold, but to redeem the lament? To say this land isn’t lost. It’s remembered. It’s refused. It’s fought for.

We’re standing on a threshold. Between stories told about this land and stories told from it.

One says this place is empty, lost, ruined. Ready to be bought, branded, and offset.
The other says this place is alive, remembered, and still resisting. One makes the Highlands a safe sell for tourists, investors, and carbon traders. The other makes the Gàidhealtachd dangerous again. Full of memory, relationship, and unfinished history.

This gathering is not about resisting BrewDog. It’s about refusing the frame. It’s about standing at the source of the wilderness myth and saying – We’re not ghosts. We’re not nostalgic. We’re not leaving. We’re here to remember differently. To remember the people who were cleared. The commons that were broken. The forests that weren’t lost but taken. Land justice isn’t just about restoring land. It’s about restoring the story. Because “wilderness” was never just empty. It was emptied.