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