John Muir's Birthplace - a Photo Essay

John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 at 128 High Street, a three-story stone house in the middle of Dunbar. Although small - the population is only 6,350 today and would have been much less in Muir's day - Dunbar has played an important part in Scotland's history and is an ancient settlement. Bronze Age artefacts and a Celtic fort have been discovered in the area, and, in the Middle Ages, Dunbar Castle was one of the most important in Scotland. King David II of Scotland made Dunbar a Royal Burgh in 1370. The town was involved in several wars with the English and was destroyed twice. However, nothing in the violent history of Dunbar is as significant as being the birthplace and first home to John Muir.

Plaque on the wall of 128 High Street, Dunbar. The house, with the new interpretative centre, was opened to the public in 2003, not without controversy, as many people in Scotland and the USA opposed the tearing out of the internal structure of the house in order to install the new exhibits, saying this was destroying the very place Muir lived. Supporters of the new centre argued that the internal structures had no historic value and that Muir spent nine of his eleven years in Dunbar living in the house next door and so was in Number 128 for a short time only.

One of the first displays inside 128 High Street is a facsimile of Muir's birth certificate, showing he was born to Daniel Muir and Anne Gilrye. Daniel Muir is described as a shopkeeper, though he was actually a dealer in grain. He became a farmer when he emigrated to Wisconsin.

A model of Muir (with a rather jaunty hat!) tucked into a corner of 128 High Street. The wool clothing is a reminder that in Muir's day there was no specialist outdoor clothing and none of the high tech materials we have today. Yet Muir traveled light, often with just what would fit in his pockets, including minimal food. "Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need - not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment." Excerpt from My First Summer in the Sierra.

128 High Street is full of quotations from Muir. This is one of my favourites, a reminder that nature never ceases. The simple line "It is always sunrise somewhere" is one I find extraordinarily uplifting. The quotation, which comes from Muir's journals and was first published in John of the Mountains long after his death, continues "Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

On Dunbar High Street there is a statue of the young John Muir mounted on a big block of old red sandstone, a common local rock.. On the block is mounted this plaque with a quotation from Muir in which he reveals that it was in and around Dunbar that he learnt his love of wild places, where he learnt "to gaze and wonder" at nature.

The statue of the young John Muir in Dunbar High Street. Muir is shown with a branch as a staff and holding a hand up to the sky where three seagulls wheel. Wind blows his clothing as he stares up into the vast world across which he would travel and on which he would have such a significant effect.

Signs for the John Muir Way decorate a lamp post. The ruins of Dunbar Castle are in the background. The John Muir Way is still under development and will eventually link Dunbar with Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders. At present, two sections of seventeen and fourteen miles are complete.

One of Dunbar's two harbours, with the ruins of the castle overlooking the entrance. This is the Victoria Harbour, built in the 1840s. The much older Cromwell Harbour, completed in 1730, established Dunbar as a major east coast fishing port. There was a fort at Dunbar in Roman times, but the first stone castle was probably originally built in the 1070s. The castle was besieged and rebuilt several times in the next 500 years before finally being destroyed in the 1560s. Today the tottering remnants are dangerous and closed to the public. Muir climbed on the crumbling walls as a boy, describing it as "one of our best playgrounds."

Waves break through an arch in the Dunbar cliffs. Some old masonry can be seen on the right. The young John Muir climbed on these loose, disintegrating cliffs, learning skills that would prove useful in his solo climbs in the High Sierra. "We tried to see who could climb highest on the crumbling peaks and crags and took chances that no cautious mountaineer would try" (from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth). The cliffs are made of sedimentary rock cut with intrusions of volcanic rock. It was not far from Dunbar, at Siccar Point, that another great Scottish scientist, James Hutton, found confirmation of his geological theories in the rocks in 1788. Hutton is regarded as the father of modern geology and the geologist who first established that the earth is extremely old.

The sands and rocks of Dunbar with the North Sea stretching out to the distant Bass Rock, a volcanic plug in the mouth of the Firth of Forth (the estuary of the river Forth). Bass Rock is home to around 150,000 gannets, the largest concentration of these sea birds in the world.

The John Muir Country Park covers some three square miles of coastline on the western edge of Dunbar, including the ruins of Dunbar Castle. The cliffs, beaches, and rock pools have changed little since Muir explored them as a boy.

Information boards on the John Muir Country Park show that some parts of the coast are now more like they would have been in Muir's day than they were in the years after he left Dunbar. In the late nineteenth century the beach below this sign was a "ladies bathing" area with a changing pavilion and privacy regulations, as mixed bathing was regarded with disapproval. Today the bathing area is long gone and we can wander the beaches and rock pools gazing at the wildlife like Muir, something I can relate to, having been brought up on the coast myself and gained my love of nature and the wild from the same sort of places.

Looking across low exposed rocks covered with pools and the surging cold waters of the North Sea to the decaying remains of Dunbar Castle, barely distinguishable from the rocks from which it was built at this distance.

The North Sea crashes against the rocks below the Dunbar cliffs, uncontrolled and untamed, redolent of wild nature and the call of adventure, journeys to wild places and the joys of exploration and discovery. "By the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness," wrote Muir in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.