The name of Scotland comes up frequently in matters of sustainability and good destination stewardship. While on holiday there, Executive Editor Jonathan Tourtellot kept an eye out for examples. This is what he found, with all photography thanks to him.
Cows, trees, and a B Corp tour company all have sustainability stories to tell. Kelpies, too.
From the hair-shrouded face emerges a tongue wide as the palm of my hand and with the texture of a carpenter’s rasp. It curls around the treat I am offering. For a suburban-raised American like me, this first up-close encounter with a Highland cow makes for a take-home memory. The ginger-colored shaggy coat, handle bar horns, and endearingly long bangs have made it a Scottish icon. Iain McLeod is welcoming a handful of us tourists to his hillside croft. Far below, a boat etches a tiny, curving wake across the sprawl of Loch Ness.
This distinctive, locally flavored travel experience is just what my wife, Sally, and I have been looking for on our independent tour of Scotland. My goal is to gain a visitor’s eye view of this country’s relatively good reputation for sustainable practices and good destination stewardship. Is it warranted? What lessons can Scotland offer?
This is the first of three planned stops in that quest, plus an unplanned surprise. One thing seems clear: Much of Scotland does not lack for tourists, certainly not in high season. Now, in mid-June, most places in the popular Highlands are already tightly booked. Overtourism has touched the country in various locations. Heavy traffic overloads the too-successful “North Coast 500” driving route. The Royal Mile in Edinburgh seems to have capitulated almost entirely to mass tourism. Numerous shops sell cheap kilts and souvenirs made in China.
The national tourism plan for 2030 wisely eschews any knee-jerk appeal for endless growth, instead calling for “Responsible tourism for a sustainable future.” The plan is still quite industry-focused, though, giving only a brief nod to caring for the character of Scottish places: “Our landscape, scenery, natural and built heritage will be cared for, protected and invested in ….” Great! But how? The plan does at least include more community involvement.
Community Tourism at Work
Here on this hill above Loch Ness, we are part of a community-tourism success story, enjoying the local “Coo Tour.” (That’s not a typo, just the jocular rendition of local pronunciation: “the heilan coo.”) It’s a star offering of the Loch Ness Hub, a community-owned and run touring collaborative. As we admire and feed McLeod’s “coos,” he explains the tough economic challenges of cattle and crofting. Tour income has enabled him to maintain the tradition that he loves – raising Highland cows and so preserving a cultural element of the Scottish countryside. In my book, that’s good destination stewardship, much in keeping with the goals of the Loch Ness Hub.
Headquartered in Drumnadrochit, on the north shore of the loch, the Hub opened in 2021 after Visit Scotland closed its regional office there in 2018 and transferred assets to the community.
“What was the key to success?” I ask the director, Russell Fraser.
“Communication!” he instantly exclaims. In my mind I picture the many people in this region who might well be weary of high-season tourist traffic and unrelenting requests to see the “monster.” Fraser’s years of working with community meetings gave him a key insight about humanity in general: “Communities know what they don’t want. They are much less certain about what they do want.” So forming the Hub required lots of talking with lots of people: What benefits did they want from tourism?
The process worked. “Loch Ness Hub provides a platform for the entire community to come together and form a strategy of telling our own story and giving visitors a reason to stop in our village, rather than simply ticking the box for tourism.” A consensus has evolved to emphasize authentic experiential tourism, farm-to-table cuisine, fair wages, environmental stewardship, and benefits for local crofters and citizens. “More is better” tourism was out. “We want people to feel like temporary locals while they’re here,” he says. “Community ownership allows us to share our heritage and culture with visitors. They go away having met the people of the places they visit.”
Regenerating Nature
When I first heard of the Dundreggan Rewilding Centre I had assumed it was one of those places that cares for injured wildlife for release back into the wild. Wrong. This group’s goal is not to rewild individual creatures but to rewild northern Scotland.
All of it.
The Dundreggan Centre opened in 2023. An access drive from the highway a few miles west of Loch Ness leads up to the building. The Centre is the first tourist-facing manifestation of Trees for Life, a 40-year-old Scottish project turned independent charity in 1993. The charity bought and began rewilding the 10,000-acre Dundreggan estate in 2008. The Centre, they claim, is the first rewilding attraction in the world.
Maybe so, I conclude, as Franny Schlicke, the Visitor Experience and Operations Supervisor, takes time out to show us around. The aim, she explains, is to restore the old-growth Highland ecosystem, known as the Caledonian forest, and reintroduce the variety of life that once flourished there before overwhelming grazing and tree cutting.
“How much remains?” I ask.
“Less than one percent.”
In the face of this looming ecosystem extinction, ecologist Alan Watson Featherstone established Trees for Life in 1986, with its headquarters at the Scottish eco-spiritual settlement of Findhorn. Today some 60 people work across the charity and for the Dundreggan Centre.
Schlicke leads us out along a path toward the tree nursery. Other walking routes lead up into the wooded upland. We pass some dormitories for volunteers and drop-in tourists. Trees for Life volunteer work involves collecting seeds, growing saplings, and transplanting saplings into the wild as well as monitoring wildlife, invasive plant removal, and other activities.
“It’s not just an obsession with trees,” says Schlicke, “It’s everything that goes with the trees. Our definition of rewilding is working with nature for the benefit of wildlife and people. So we look at the natural environment, tree cover and all the species that should be there, but we also try to create a landscape that can support people living in the north of Scotland.”
She acknowledges reality: “People are always going to be chopping down trees, because they need timber and land for agriculture, but in the past, you would chop down a tree and then there would be regeneration. There would still be the forest and soil and new trees coming through.”
“That doesn’t happen now?” I ask. “There is less regeneration because our deer population is so high, and our deer population is so high because we have hunted all of our predators to extinction.”
So you need wolves? “Actually, we are looking at lynx.” Even though lynx are too small to take down adult deer, she explains, simply re-introducing a predator into the landscape would keep the deer fearful and moving. Less likely to denude saplings.
I ask about all the pine trees we’ve seen on our drives. Not native. “In terms of rewilding that supports jobs, if we had more native timber production, that would reduce the likelihood of importing diseases. It’s often better-quality hardwood. You can command a higher price for it.”
“How on earth do we expect people to care if they don't have access to the sort of landscape we want them to care about?”
In effect, Dundreggan Centre is Trees for Life’s first storefront, a showcase for rewilding’s benefits and opportunities. Most visitors are daytrippers. “We’re on a main road, you are free to enter, park, use the café, look at all the interpretation, and chat with the staff. You can come on these footpaths by yourself, but you will probably get more out of it if you book a tour.”
She sums up: “Anyone can come. If we want people to care about landscapes like this, they need to properly see that they exist and understand more about them than they can looking through the window of a vehicle.”
She excuses herself to keep an appointment with a busload of newly arrived tourists.
Mercat, Scotland’s First B Corp Visitor Attraction
When I asked VisitScotland for examples of sustainable-tourism leaders, one of their recommendations was Mercat Tours in Edinburgh, a B Corp member, specializing in history tours and local-community support – “connecting people, places and the past through the power of storytelling.”
I’ve arranged to meet the Managing Director, Kat Brogan, in their offices on a narrow street deep in the cobble-and-stonework of Edinburgh’s Old Town. One of Mercat’s tours goes through the very bowels of the medieval city, the deep, labyrinthine Blair Street Underground Vaults, so it seemed fitting that I am ushered down into a windowless candlelit chamber called Megget’s Cellar, well below street level.
Brogan is graciously waiting at a large wooden table. She taps it proudly. “Made from recycled church benches.” Mercat clearly favors circular-economy thinking. She relates how her historian father started the company, seeking a bigger audience than a classroom. It began as “four history professors having a hoot of a time.”
Now it’s the first Scottish tour company to earn B Corp status. She explains some of the elements involved. Mercat supports the Grassmarket Community Project for Edinburgh’s vulnerable and marginalized. “New Scots” – refugees and recent immigrants – also receive Mercat support. Cultural stewardship takes the form of providing free school field trips – the most memorable way to learn, she notes – funded by visitor donations. The goal is to breed an understanding of Scottish history and culture. “If you don’t have it by ten,” she says, “you never have it.”
The conversation takes a new turn when I learn that Brogan is on the committee for recommending where Edinburgh should apply revenues from the new Visitor Levy tourist tax. The Scottish Parliament had approved the tax, leaving it up to a 12-person committee, the “Transient Visitor Levy Forum,” for each Scottish region to advise elected officials how to use the funds to best benefit visitors and locals equally. Significantly, community representatives share power with the tourism industry – six committee slots each.
A New, Fitting Landmark
Good destination stewardship involves more than conservation, preservation, and even equity. New ways to celebrate the place and its traditions also count, via food, music, architecture, performances – or landscape art. When we hear of one such example, we have to take a look.
In Falkirk, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, we spy them: The Kelpies (opening photo). Two steel horses’ heads, taller than a nine-story building, rise above the landscape around the old industrial town.
In Scottish folklore, kelpies were mythical spirits seen in stormy ocean breakers. Why immortalize ocean spirits here, in landlocked Falkirk? Because its canals, the reasoning goes, connected the city’s once-thriving industries to the sea.
After manufacturing foundered, the city commissioned artist Andy Scott to do something to boost tourism. He designed the two kelpies, one looking forward and the other rearing high, to be the world’s largest equine structures. Created in 2014, they have brought in an estimated £81-million in tourism over the ensuing decade.
Landscape art is of course in the eye of the beholder. Sally and I find The Kelpies quite wonderful. They work as a contribution to destination excellence in four ways: They are true to the culture, they are unique, they bring tourism to a place that needs it, and they are well executed. They’ll continue to gain renown as more travelers come to know them. Locally, that can build pride in culture and pride in place, key ingredients for a lasting stewardship ethic.
Based on our unsystematic, tourist-eye holiday trip, Scotland seemed to be doing its best for good stewardship and sustainability, stacking up higher than many other developed countries. Even on the touristy Royal Mile, we see meticulous work underway to replace the old cobblestone paving with brand new cobblestones. And so preserving the Old Town’s World Heritage status. While no nationwide destination-stewardship program seems in the offing – a significant problem in most countries – Scotland can claim numerous local victories amid a cultural inclination toward sustainability. These days, that’s a win.
