This article examines the pastoral tradition in Ulster-Scots literature, an emergent form of Irish cultural expression in the eighteenth century. A late eighteenth-century flourishing of Ulster-Scots poetry has often been associated with an East Ulster regional paradigm: the rustic poet, small farmer, egalitarian and Presbyterian, Ulster Scot of Antrim and Down. However this article argues that Ulster-Scots literature begins almost a century earlier, and that the environments depicted in the literary works studied herein, range from the pastoralised landscape of north-west Ireland, and the rugged mountains of Donegal, to the urban, carnivalised confessional spaces of central Dublin. This revision of the growth of Ulster-Scots literature is further complicated by the presence of a ubiquitous Anglo-Irish print culture.