Cream of Devon

I'm staying in a picturesque village tucked away in a valley on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. I'm not keen on that word, but there's really no other way to describe Lustleigh, with its babbling brooks, thatched cottages and quaint tearoom. 

Lustleigh churchyard

I'm here to visit family friends John and Sheila. John is one of my father's oldest and dearest friends, a climbing buddy from Cambridge days. I've known him all my life. He was with my dad when I was born, raising a glass to toast my arrival. Now I'm here to see how he's recovering from a rather severe stroke he suffered a few months ago.

Lunch with John and Sheila

Astonishingly well, is the answer. He is whizzing around the house on a wheelie-walker thing, and even managing the stairs. It's nothing short of a miracle, given how ill he seemed when we saw him in hospital just before Christmas. But if John's recovery is a miracle, then Sheila is the miracle worker, devotedly fighting his corner and somehow making things happen, so that now here he is back home, enjoying the spring sunshine and the beautiful camellia blooming in the front garden.

Camellia in exquisite bloom

  
I take a couple of walks during my stay – the valley and surrounding hills are a maze of primrose-lined paths and wooded bridleways that lead to pretty stone bridges and lush open pastures. 

Brightening up the woodland path

The old stone bridge over the River Bovey

Hardy-esque scene – the post stopped carts crossing the bridge

One of my walks circles back via the village and I pop into the Church of St John the Baptist. Parts of it date back to the 13th century and it's now a listed building. Sheila has recommended a look at the 20th-century pew-ends – positively contemporary – that featured in a TV programme. 

Pew-end by 19th-century wood-carver Herbert Read

Not far from here is Haytor, one of the rocky outcrops scattered across Dartmoor. I'm so pleased when Sheila takes a break so we can enjoy a quick stroll together in the late afternoon sunshine. We call in at Sheila's favourite farm shop and I'd have cheerfully spent a fortune on its tempting range of condiments and preserves, if only I'd remembered my purse. Next time…

Face of Haytor

Hilltop meadow at Hisley village

She belongs to Glasgow

To Glasgow, for my father's lovely partner Marion's 'surprise' 70th birthday party. I've met many of Marion's family, the MacCormicks, over the years. They're Scottish aristocracy in my book, and in a lot of people's books, being mostly descended from one of the founders of the Scottish National Party. We've certainly come to the right place for a heated debate on independence.

Scottish party people 

The venue is Marion's niece's spacious flat in Hillhead. This isn't far from where my father grew up, in a five-storey Georgian terraced house just off the Great Western Road. Dad's stamping ground was the nearby Botanic Gardens, with its Victorian glasshouse, the Kibble Palace.

My father's childhood home

Looking up inside the Kibble

Marion grew up near here too, in a top-floor flat in the prestigious Park district, with its sweeping, circular Georgian terraces overlooking Kelvingrove park and its famous museum.

Marion beneath her childhood home

I treated myself to first class on the way up to Glasgow, but Virgin's service is not a patch on East Coast Trains, with the hot water machine broken and the food offering, a snack box, containing a tiny package of nuts and a brioche rubbery enough to use as wood filler. I jump on the Metro to Hillhead, where the station's tiled entrance has been decorated by writer and artist Alasdair Gray, a tribute to this thriving, fashionable neighbourhood at the heart of Glasgow's West End. I love his quote in the middle: 'Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing, to earn what we need to keep going, prevent what you once felt when wee, hopeful and free.'

Tiled mural at Hillhead station

Close-up of one of the panels

Marion's party is a huge success. Some 50 friends and family gather to toast her special day (though she had actually fled the country on the actual day, back in January, for a cycle tour of Rajasthan with friends). Tables groan with hams, quiches, salads, cakes and puddings. The shower serves as a great cold-store for fine wine and fizz. Reminiscence is in the air and there's robust discussion on the pros and cons of Scottish independence – my brother Sean and sister Moira, both voting this September, are foolhardy enough to ask for some clarification, which is duly and vehemently given.

The bar

Cake o'clock

The following morning, following a big family breakfast, Marion leads a few of us on a walking tour of the West End, starting at the university with its historic cloisters. We take in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and an exhibition on the Glasgow Boys school of painters.

Glasgow Uni cloisters

Spring arrives in Kelvingrove

Head set – Kelvingrove gallery

Then we hop on a bus to the Glasgow School of Art. We sign up for a tour of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building, completed in 1909. An artist and designer as well as an architect, Mackintosh took a holistic approach to the project, extending his remit to include interior decor, furniture and fittings. It's fascinating doing the tour with my brother Roddy, an architect, and he mentions that his practice, Cullinan Architects, designed the new shower room in the director's apartment. Sadly it is currently out of bounds.

Skye at the Glasgow School of Art main entrance

Stairwell – concrete never looked better

Interior window

Opposite Mackintosh's building, an extension to the campus is in progress, a glass-panelled monolith designed by a New York architect, Steven Holl. Controversy has raged about the choice of scheme. I like it, particularly the way it wraps around one of the school's original buildings. There's a building team on site, but their main task today seems to be removing all the green panels of glass that have cracked. 'Those panels are a gift for any Glaswegian vandal,' says Rod.

Glasgow School of Art's wraparound newbuild

And so, waving goodbye to Marion, it's back on the train with Rod and Skye, computers and homework all the way.

Room with a view

Nature boy

A quick stopover in Dunbar with an old family friend Su, reminds me of my expedition to Yosemite last year. Dunbar is where the founder of Yosemite National Park, John Muir, was born. That was in 1838, when Dunbar was a bustling fishing port, though his father had moved the family there for a job in forces recruitment.

Dunbar's old harbour

Sign of a fishing community

John Muir was worked hard as a boy, and whipped hard, too, because that’s the way they got the three Rs into them in those days. Nor was there much respite when he got home. His father was devoutly religious and a severe disciplinarian. But rather than be cowed, John and his brother used to escape, to footer about in the fields and potter among the rock pools, and to the cliffs, ‘to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle, when the sea and the sky, the waves and the cloud, were mingled together as one.’

The ruins of Dunbar Castle

First stop today as we leave Su’s flat in a handsome Edwardian building close to the seafront, is a sculpture of Muir by Valentin Znoba, showing him in full St Francis of Assisi mode. I’ve been looking at Su’s ceramics in her cellar workshop and her work seems far more in tune with nature and the environment to me.

Znoba's statue of John Muir

Su on the high street

The Muirs’ old house has been converted into a museum, which is where I lose myself for the next hour. I learned the story of America’s John Muir when I went to a one-man play in the Yosemite Valley last year. But this filled in the gaps and gave a sense of what had shaped this extraordinary man, one of the world's first ‘eco-warriors’.

Papa Muir and the family left Dunbar for a farm in Wisconsin when John was 11, ostensibly in pursuit of the religious freedom that America offered. There was backbreaking farm work in store for the young lad, but at least he was close to nature. Later, he was to travel the world in search of new wildernesses – he even once revisited Dunbar – but it was in the Sierra Nevada that he found his paradise on earth, Yosemite, which is why he fought so hard to protect it, so that it could be shared by all. ‘Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,’ he said. ‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.’

Muir was way ahead of Darwin in believing everything in nature is linked, though his theories had a firm Christian basis. ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ Unlike Darwin, Muir believed it was God’s Universe. A lovely line, mind.
Later, I head out to the craggy headlands to the north of town. There are no awful storms today so the craggy headlands have a warm rosy glow.

The red cliffs of Dunbar

Looking north

This part of the coastline is where the John Muir Way begins and this April, to mark 100 years since his death, it is being revamped and extended to become the new John Muir Link will be opened - by Alex Salmond no less. It’s a 134-mile walk from Dunbar to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland (not far from where the Muirs set sail for America). As I turn inland, the rising moon over a serene sea gives me an idea for another walk…

Moonrise over Dunbar