John Murray is a chartered landscape architect. His research ranges over a variety of subjects.
John studied biology at the University of Sussex and landscape architecture at the University of Manchester. He practised landscape architecture in London, Greater Manchester and the Scottish Borders. He is a fellow of the Landscape Institute and the Higher Education Academy. His research interests, resulting in peer-refereed publications, concern art in the landscape, sustainable landscape architecture practice, and the pedagogy of the design review, fieldwork methods, the landscape history of Edinburgh and the toponymy of the Scottish Highlands.
John’s public engagement includes Tales from the Tweed, which was part of Edinburgh’s public engagement ‘Beltane’ network and lectures to the Scottish Place-Names Society and the Clan MacLauchlan Society. He is currently developing a smartphone app on Gaelic place-names in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park with the help of Gaelic medium schools in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Literature of the Gaelic Landscape: From the comfort of an armchair and with the aid of this new book, the reader can travel to the Breadalbane and Argyll of Duncan Bàn Macintyre; the Skye and Raasay of Sorley Maclean; and the Caithness and Sutherland of Neil M. Gunn. Photographs, maps and place-names linked to key passages in the texts will immerse readers in the landscapes which songs, poems and tales have described and enlivened over the ages.
The author has immersed himself further in the Gaelic literature of place so that readers, with book in hand, can make the past come alive and appreciate the extracts about a place and what has happened there.
Literature of the Gaelic Landscape compares Gaelic literature with other world traditions and their relationship to place and storytelling, providing an overview of how the literature relates to landscape and place over the ages.