Harbour, coast and Muir country
Dunbar
Shellfish boats work below a ruined castle while clifftop walks, beaches and John Muir country stretch along the shore.
- Best for
- Harbour history and coastal walking
- Give it
- A full day, with much more for a longer stay
- Don't miss
- The working harbour below the castle ruins
Photo: Richard West · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A working harbour town with a long coastal memory
Dunbar brings shellfish boats, castle history, John Muir's legacy and broad coastal landscapes into one compact town guide.
Start with the twin harbours and clifftop promenades, then choose between the John Muir Way, the habitats of John Muir Country Park, red-sandstone landmarks, brewing heritage and two very different beaches.
Where to go
Places in Dunbar
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesJohn Muir Country Park
A coastal park of Belhaven Bay, the Tyne estuary, dunes and woodland, with around 400 plant species and varied birdlife.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 120 minutes
- Locality
- coastline northwest of the town, near West Barns
Dunbar Parish Church
A twin-towered landmark built in local red sandstone in 1818-21, badly damaged by fire in 1987 and subsequently restored.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- on a rise above the harbour and sea
East Beach
The smaller of Dunbar's two nearby beaches, with rock pools as its defining feature.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Dunbar
Food & drink
1 placeBelhaven Brewery
A brewery dating to 1719 that produces around twenty beers, including Belhaven Best, Belhaven 80 Shilling and Black Scottish Stout.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 120 minutes
- Locality
- Belhaven district of Dunbar
Walks & outdoors
2 placesJohn Muir Way
The eastern end of a coast-to-coast route across central Scotland, leaving the harbour by clifftop promenade before dunes and estuary.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 120 minutes for a selected outing
- Locality
- eastern terminus at Dunbar harbour
Belhaven Beach
The broad western beach within the coastal landscape taken in by John Muir Country Park.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- to the west of Dunbar
History & heritage
2 places
Dunbar Harbour
Twin harbours where shellfish boats still land crabs and lobsters, with clifftop promenades and the remains of Dunbar Castle above.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- below the town
John Muir's Birthplace
The High Street birthplace of John Muir, born here in 1838 before emigrating to Wisconsin aged eleven, is now a museum.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- on the High Street
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Three ways to explore Dunbar
Signature outings
Shellfish below the castle
See the shellfish boats working from Dunbar's twin harbours below the surviving castle ruins.
John Muir's beginnings
Visit the High Street house where John Muir was born in 1838, now a museum devoted to his story.
Belhaven since 1719
Explore Dunbar's defining brewing landmark in the Belhaven district, where brewing dates to 1719.
The town story
Dunbar Town Guide
A source-locked story of shellfish harbours, castle sieges, John Muir country, brewing, red sandstone and an unusually sunny coast.
Twin Harbours and Castle
Dunbar harbour still lands crabs and lobsters, and has done for well over a century. The Fishery Board's annual report for 1913 put it plainly: "The principal earnings are from crabs and lobsters." The fishing fleet has gone, but the shellfish boats remain, working out of twin harbours below the town. Above them run two clifftop promenades, with volcanic rock, deposits and dykes exposed along the shore.
The harbour has a castle over it, or what is left of one. Dunbar Castle was rebuilt around 1490, deliberately slighted by Act of Parliament in 1567, and had its north end blown up in 1842–44 to build Victoria Harbour. In 1338 it was held through a siege by Black Agnes, Countess of Dunbar; Joan Beaufort, Queen of Scots, took refuge here and died in it in 1445. The ruins now mark the southern edge of the John Muir Country Park.
John Muir Coast and Belhaven Brewing
That park is the reason a lot of people come. It covers 713.5 hectares along 13 km of coast northwest of town, taking in Belhaven Bay, the Tyne estuary, dunes and woodland, with around 400 plant species and birds that include whooper swans, little terns and green woodpeckers. The John Muir Way, a coast-to-coast route across central Scotland, starts at the harbour and runs west. You can walk out of town along its marked route.
The town's defining drink is brewed in the Belhaven district. Belhaven Brewery has been going since 1719 and by 2005 was described as the largest and oldest surviving independent brewery in Scotland. It makes around twenty beers, among them Belhaven Best, Belhaven 80 Shilling and a Black Scottish Stout. Princess Anne opened a new brewhouse on 18 January 2013.
Red Sandstone, Muir and Recreation
Dunbar Parish Church stands on a rise above the sea, twin-towered and built of local red sandstone quarried at Bourhouse between 1818 and 1821. Fire badly damaged it on 3 January 1987, destroying historic elements of the interior; it was restored afterwards. Along the High Street, John Muir was born on 21 April 1838, third of eight children, and emigrated to Wisconsin aged eleven. His birthplace is now a museum, and a statue of him stands beside the town clock.
There is plenty for a week. Dunbar Golf Club is a links course laid out in 1857 and redesigned by Old Tom Morris around 1894. Foxlake, near the town, was Scotland's first cable wakeboarding centre, and there is coastal rowing, surfing and paddleboarding off the beaches. Two of those beaches sit close by: the small East Beach, good for rock pools, and the broad sweep of Belhaven to the west.
Connections and Sunshine
The A1 runs just south of town, the railway station has been on the East Coast Main Line since 1845 with services to Edinburgh and London, and buses connect to North Berwick and the other East Lothian towns. Edinburgh is about thirty miles west, roughly forty minutes by A1 or rail.
Dunbar gets around 1,450 hours of sunshine a year, a notably high figure for this stretch of the North Sea coast.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Coastal East Lothian , Rainclouds Approaching Dunbar Harbour, Dunbar - geograph.org.uk - 2474375.jpg — photograph by Richard West; Coastal East Lothian : Rainclouds Approaching Dunbar Harbour, Dunbar by Richard West. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Dunbar Harbour — dunbarharbourtrust.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- John Muir Country Park — eastlothian.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- John Muir Way — johnmuirtrust.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Belhaven Brewery — belhaven.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Dunbar Parish Church — portal.historicenvironment.scot statutory register or public authority
- John Muir's Birthplace — jmbt.org.uk other published source
- East Beach — visiteastlothian.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Belhaven Beach — bathingwaters.sepa.org.uk other published source