The father of national parks
He’s famous in the USA, yet John Muir was born in a small town in southern Scotland and his spirit can be found in its remotest Highlands.
THOSE ARE THE words of John Muir, famed in the USA as the Father of National Parks for his pioneering work protecting California’s Yosemite. But this extraordinary naturalist, writer, walker, campaigner, geologist, farmer and madcap inventor was born in a small town in southern Scotland, and his spirit can be found in its remotest Highlands.
Celtic roots
Walk to the harbour in Dunbar and you’ll see the walls of a castle climbing from a rock in the North Sea. To many they are poignant remnants of one of Scotland’s strongest forts, 25 miles from the battle-scarred border with England. But to a young John Muir they were a place to go mountaineering. ‘One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn,’ he wrote later. ‘We tried to see who could climb highest on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances no cautious mountaineer would try.’
John was born at 126 High Street – now the John Muir’s Birthplace Museum – on April 21 1838, the third of what would be eight children. His father Daniel was a strict Christian who believed life should consist of hard work and devotion to the Bible; by age 11 John knew nearly all its verses by heart and by the ‘sore flesh’ of frequent floggings. ‘Nevertheless, like devout martyrs of wildness,’ he wrote, ‘we stole away to the seashore or the green, sunny fields with almost religious regularity, taking advantage of opportunities when father was very busy.’ West of town a stretch of shore is now the John Muir Country Park where you can wander and ‘wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks’ just as Muir did. Or for a longer adventure you can set out on the John Muir Way to Helensburgh on the west coast (see panel on p64). But I’m headed to one of Britain’s remotest places, to the first land purchased by the John Muir Trust, to spend a weekend in the kind of intense wilderness that later inspired this ‘John of the Mountains’.
The Rough Bounds
Drive 20 miles north of Fort William and take a left turn off the A87, and you’ll have started down the longest dead-end road in Britain. 22 bumpy, single-track miles later the Tarmac stops at the hamlet of Kinloch Hourn. This is the edge of Knoydart, 55,000 acres of deep glen and rugged mountain between Loch Hourn on this north side and Loch Nevis to the south. No road goes through these ‘rough bounds’ and the only other way to reach it is by ferry to the village of Inverie, 13 miles away on the other side of the peninsula.
In the USA, mountains, lakes, passes, woods, trails, an inlet, a glacier and even a stretch of highway have been named after Muir – so many places in fact, that the Geological Survey now says it is ‘not likely to approve any further such commemorations’.
Knoydart is often called Britain’s last wilderness, and I’m walking into the heart of it, tracing a path along the shore of Loch Hourn to Barrisdale Bay. The loch here is narrow and walled by mountains steep enough to make it feel like a fjord. Trees stubble the lower slopes; crag roughens the upper ones; and it’s all doubled in the mirror still water. It is an extraordinarily beautiful place, one where you can understand words Muir wrote in 1911: ‘We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun.’
Muir wasn’t writing of Scotland, though. His father upped the family and emigrated to America when John was 10 years old, before he’d had any chance to visit his native Highlands. Wisconsin was their destination, where John delighted in the wild lands and wildlife: ‘Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all widely, gladly rejoicing together’. But it was the settlers’ way to claim land for farm, and the Muirs felled trees, dug out roots, ploughed and planted land, shot birds, and when a well was needed, John was made to work with hammer and chisel for weeks on end, once nearly dying from breathing carbon dioxide in the bottom of the 80-foot shaft.
Despite the exhausting toil, John hungered for knowledge and won grudging permission from his father to study before the work-day started at 6am. At 1am, he would leap from bed and head for the basement to design and build extraordinary machines. There were ‘water-wheels, curious door locks and latches, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer’; an early-rising machine, which would tip a sleeper out of bed at the allotted hour, much like the one in Wallace & Gromit; and a postureimproving ‘loafer’s chair’ which fired blanks from a pistol if anyone slumped into the seat.
It’s seven miles to Barrisdale Bay, and it takes me seven hours. Not because it’s arduous – the path is sometimes rocky and sometimes climbs the hill a little, but it’s always clear – but because I want to absorb every bit of what I’m seeing. The along-loch view reframes constantly, with each new angle of mountain and water more gorgeous than the last. The detail is bewitching too: the tiny deep-pink lanterns of bilberry flowers, the cracked rust
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees... cares will drop leaves.” off like autumn
JOHN MUIR, OUR NATIONAL PARKS
chequerboard of Scots pine bark, a fallen tree branch tinted mint by emerald elf-cup fungus.
Flora was one of Muir’s obsessions. He started botanizing while studying at the University of Wisconsin, and soon after went hunting flowers around Lake Ontario. This was no dry interest in taxonomy: a companion described Muir rushing between blooms ‘babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk, worshipping his little blue-and-pink goddesses’, and stuffing specimens into his pockets and shirt until he was ‘bulbing and sprouting all over’. Once, on discovering Calypso borealis orchids in bloom, he wept for joy: ‘Could angels in their better land show us a more beautiful plant?’
But plants didn’t pay the rent and Muir had to labour, and put his inventive mind to work, at tool factories in Canada and Indiana – until a terrible accident. In 1867 a file pierced his right eye and his left went blind ‘in sympathy’. For weeks he kept to a lightless room, occasionally dictating letters to friends: ‘The sunshine and winds are working in all the gardens of God, but I – I am lost. I am shut in darkness.’ His eyesight recovered, but the experience marked a turning point: ‘This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields. God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.’
The 1000-mile walk
These seven miles pale in comparison to Muir’s next expedition, as he set out on a 1000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida by the ‘wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find.’
Only a handful of buildings dot the shore here at Barrisdale Bay; in fact, only 120 people live on this entire peninsula. Yet 200 years ago 1000
people would have called Knoydart home, forging a living by fishing, and farming cattle, potatoes, oats and barley. Then in 1852, 400 residents were served eviction notices. The following August 330 were forced onto the Sillery bound for Canada and their homes destroyed; the 60 who fled to the hills were left destitute.
The landowners wanted the area cleared so they could farm sheep, making crofters homeless and with no choice but to leave.
The world Muir walked through in 1867 was shaped by conflict too. Settlers had forced Native Americans from their lands.
The American Civil War was just two years finished, and the states – especially the southern ones – still bore the scars:
‘The traces of war are not only apparent on the broken fields, burnt fences, mills, and woods ruthlessly slaughtered, but also on the countenances of the people.’
And the destruction of America’s wild lands continued apace. Even on his little-trodden route, Muir couldn’t miss the sight and sound of ancient forests being felled, and it perhaps sowed the seeds of the conservationist he would later become.
I book into the little lodge at Barrisdale, and take a mug of tea and a Tunnock’s teacake outside. Muir had no truck with such luxuries. Some days he did not eat at all, on others only bread, and he often slept out under the stars. Arriving in Savannah, Georgia, he bedded down in a graveyard. It was a beautiful one – ‘Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the few graves are powerless in such a depth of life’ – but it’s likely a mosquito bite gave him malaria, and by the time he reached Florida he was feverishly ill.
Muir survived and a few months later, aged 30, he travelled west to California and saw Yosemite for the first time. This spectacular valley, a mile wide and seven and a half long, lies 4000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It is meadowed with wildflowers, forested with ancient trees, and walled in by immense granite peaks including the mighty Half Dome and El Capitan. Muir’s first encounter wasn’t quite the rapturous moment you might expect though; he encountered a bear, got scared, and when he bought a gun for protection, accidentally shot his companion, Joseph Chilwell, in the shoulder. Writing about it later he skimmed over that to note: ‘It is by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.’
I think Barrisdale Bay is one of those special temples of Nature too. Rippled gold sand leads out to a molten sea; still a long way from the open ocean, it laps gently between long lines of empty hills. To the left, the land soars up over a kilometre to serrated bread-knife ridges and the top of Ladhar Bheinn, the 3346-foot ‘hoofed mountain’ that caps Knoydart. And curled within the mountain’s flank lie the craggy depths of Coire Dhorrcail, which is where I head next morning.
In 1983 the Ministry of Defence started eyeing this wild corner of Scotland for use as a bombing range. In response, a conservation charity – inspired by and named after John Muir – was founded, and four years later it bought 3101 acres of Knoydart’s north-eastern slopes, including this corrie and the summit of Ladhar Bheinn above.
Their work didn’t stop with the purchase. The land had been grazed barren by sheep and deer and just 3% was wooded. The John Muir Trust planted native birches, hazels and Scots pines, which are now abundant enough to regenerate
naturally, and lure back long-absent native wildlife like pine martens. The sheep have gone and deer numbers are controlled to protect the burgeoning woodland from an onslaught of hooves and teeth, and the Trust has also worked on the stalker’s path that curls me round into Coire Dhorrcail.
And it is spectacular. The deep-cut line of a burn leads up beneath fresh green trees to a cirque of crag, raked by long vertical ribs that look like a corset round Ladhar Bheinn. There’s never been an easy way to convey the feeling of places like this and some think Muir’s writing flowery, but I find it hard to resist his almost-drunken enthusiasm. ‘I'm in the woods woods woods,’ he once wrote gleefully from the sequoia forests, ‘& they are in me-ee-ee.’
He could be damning too. He took work as a shepherd so he could live close to Yosemite, but was so pained by the flock’s destruction of the wildflowers he called them ‘hooved locusts’. Much as he hated this ‘crawling sheep cloud’, they also gave him the chance to explore deeper and higher into the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Father of national parks
From the mouth of Coire Dhorrcail, adventurous walkers can thrash their way up the steep, grassy side of Stob a’ Choire Odhair and onto one of the ridges that radiate like spokes from Ladhar Bheinn. It’s trackless, and the rock above is often narrow, airy, and steep enough to need a steadying hand down, but the summit view of endless wild mountains, loch and sea is one of Britain’s finest.
Muir adored climbing even when it got him into dicey situations, like on Mount Ritter: ‘I was brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall.’ He didn’t fall, but fullon adventure was an essential part of his bond with nature. He edged onto a three-inch ledge to get a better view of Yosemite Creek hurtling off the precipice. He climbed a 100-foot Douglas Spruce in a storm and clung to its reeling top so he could ‘take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook’. He even surfed an avalanche in 1872: ‘This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced!’
And always his response to the Sierra – which he called the Range of Light – was intense, rapturous, transcendent: ‘How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left every thing for it… Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.’
I spend all day exploring Corrie Dhorrcail and neighbouring glens – vast trenches spectacularly gouged by ice. Muir advocated stillness, as well as adventure, and ‘sitting from morning till night under some willow bush on the river bank where there is a wide view. This will be ‘doing the valley’ far more effectively than... constant motion.’
In the 1870s Muir began to share his love of the wild with the world, publishing articles in numerous magazines, and later books. They were part paean to the natural world and part plea for its protection: ‘The great wilds of our country once held to be boundless and inexhaustible are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed.’
Two articles in The Century Magazine in 1890 were particularly influential, ‘The treasures of the Yosemite’ and ‘Features of the proposed Yosemite National Park’. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln had signed a Yosemite Land Grant to protect the valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias (eight years before Yellowstone became the world’s first national park), but it didn’t halt the logging, grazing, gold mining and development.
Muir’s words – plus hard work by many other campaigners including Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson – saw Yosemite become a national park in 1890. Muir was instrumental in protecting the landscapes of the Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Mount Rainier and parts of Alaska too – earning him the moniker ‘Father of National Parks’. He also co-founded the conservation chairty, The Sierra Club, and helped
“I
only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for
going out, I found, was
in.” really going
JOHN MUIR, JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS
Muir was one of the earliest to realise Yosemite had been shaped by ice and his fascination with ‘glacial writing’, drew him to Alaska again and again.
TOP OF KNOYDART Top: The Ladhar Bheinn massif (say it Larven) paddles its feet in the waves of Barrisdale Bay.
SPREADING THE WORD Insets: Our National Parks was one of many books Muir wrote, and California’s Yosemite was a constant inspiration.
inspire an international movement to protect landscapes around the globe.
Recently Muir’s legacy has come under scrutiny though, and last year the Sierra Club apologised for comments he made about Black and Indigenous people. It went on to say his ‘views evolved later in life’, which the John Muir Trust describes in detail: ‘The othering and disdain of his earlier descriptive writing is replaced by an admiration for native people’s light ecological footprint and their careful stewardship of the land. He wrote sympathetically about the misery inflicted upon native tribes by European settlers and joined the Sequoya League, an organisation set up by indigenous rights campaigner Charles Fletcher Lummis to improve the social and economic conditions of native peoples and to defend their culture.’
And Muir’s work at Yosemite wasn’t done. The valley floor, outwith the initial designation, was still at risk – until Muir took the president camping. In May 1903 Theodore Roosevelt went to Yosemite and asked Muir to be his guide: ‘I want to drop politics absolutely and be out in the open with you.’ This three-day trip – where they woke to snow on their sleeping bags – is considered the most vital conservation meeting in American history. Yosemite was expanded and Roosevelt went on to create five national parks, 150 national forests, 18 national monuments and 55 wildlife refuges.
Forever Scotland
Next morning I reluctantly retrace my steps back along the loch: Knoydart is a hard place to leave. Muir travelled far and wide during his life, but he never forgot his homeland. His Scots accent stayed strong, and he once wrote ‘there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices… oozing through all my veins.’ In 1893, he returned to Scotland, visiting Dunbar, Edinburgh and Dumfries to pay homage to Robert Burns, the poet whose works he carried on many adventures. He also visited Grasmere in the Lake District and the grave of William Wordsworth, writing to his wife
Louie at home with their two daughters, ‘I never before saw a place where I was so anxious to have you with me to enjoy it.’
This ‘poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornithnatural, etc!!!’, as he described himself, died on 24th December 1914, in a hospital bed surrounded by notes from a trip to Alaska. Muir may never have made it to Knoydart, or have walked the Highlands, but here you can share in his passion for the world’s wild places: ‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature
may heal and give strength to body and soul.’