‘No lack of wildness’ - a car-free break on the John Muir Way, Scotland

The East Lothian segment of the coast to coast trail, dedicated to the great conservationist, reveals seabird colonies, beaches and historic houses

Pioneering conservationist John Muir was born in Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland in 1838, and his birthplace is now a museum. He moved to the US when he was 11 and went on to create the Sierra Club organisation, which still protects Yosemite and other national parks. “When I was a boy in Scotland, I was fond of all things wild …” he wrote. “Around my native town of Dunbar by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation.”

In the John Muir country park near Dunbar, 30 miles east of Edinburgh, there’s a smell of stranded seaweed and crushed pine needles, the insistent peeping of oystercatchers and the rising whistles of mud-probing curlews. A bracken-bordered path, with straggles of harebells and honeysuckle, runs beside the wide Tyne estuary (Scotland also has a River Tyne), through saltmarsh dotted with samphire and sea asters, and past smooth sandy beaches where wagtails hop over the rocks. It leads on along red cliffs towards what Muir called the “craggy ruins of the old Dunbar castle”.