John Muir's Birthplace

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Content updated Sun, 31 Jan 1999 23:26:40 GMT

John Muir's Dunbar... [home]

Bamburgh Close

Logan's Close

Dunbar Parish Kirkyard - Gilrye Family Graves

This narrow close was, like the others, home to many people - there were 27 folk in 10 households here in 1841!

In Logan's Close in 1841 were:

• James Ballantyne (aged 85, a retired sailor) and Elizabeth Ballantyne (60);
• Mary White (aged 80), Mary Darg (30), Mary Darg (7) and an infant daughter aged 1 month;
• Christian Wilson (30), Mary Fairbairn (70) and Mary Shaw (7);
• Alison Allan (55, an agricultural outworker);
• Janet Hill (45, a pauper), Thomas Doughty (9) and James Mein (15);
• George Crail (70, a labourer) and Christian Crail (60);
• James Dickson (85), Jemima Dickson (20), Janet Dickson (9) and James Dickson (4);
• Helen Gordon (70, a spinster of independent means);
• Henrietta Spears (60, a washerwoman);
• James Civess (55, a labourer), Mary Civess (60), Archibald Civess (20, a labourer), Robert Civess (18, a labourer), Helen Civess (20) and Archibald Harrier an infant of 8 months.

This group is a cross-section of the poorer families of John's time. The memory of labourers, worn and old before their time, beggars in rags, and sick and ailing children, was a stimulus to John's adult sense of injustice. Their homes were often single rooms in ill-lit, draughty, unavoidably dirty old buildings. Even though the Burgh undertook to collect household waste and whitewash the closes, disease was rife. Around the years of John's birth Cholera, Typhus, Scarlet Fever and even Whooping Cough took a high toll. Under redevelopment in 1997, blocked up windows and doors in the wall on the right, at the bottom and round the corner of the close, are all that remains of the original houses.

Closes were great places for children to rush through and down, tapping on doors and windows, getting rid of energy before the discipline of school. Behind the old school wall, over to the south-east, a recent development occupies the site of the Grammar School. There, Domine (Headmaster) David Lyon

'...spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the newfangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays. There was nothing said about making the seats easy or the lessons easy. We were simply driven pointblank against our books ...(and)... if we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory...'

(The above was written in the first years of this century!)

When John started at this school, to learn French, Latin, English, spelling, history, arithmetic and geography, he

'...had a terrible lot of fighting to do, because a new scholar had to meet every one of his age who dared challenge him...'

The beach below served as another ground for mass, pitched battles, but first, head for the Church, over on the Kirkhill.