GIVEN that he is probably our most famous son, John Muir and his legacy are less well known in our county than you might expect.

His birthplace in Dunbar does its best to spread the word, but the truth is he is better known and more revered in his adopted home of California.

Dunbar was a place of changes when he was born.

With herring fishing and whaling booming, the Victoria Harbour was completed in 1842, when he was four.

In 1849, the family emigrated to start a farm in the new state of Wisconsin, founded the previous year.

Aged 22, he tried, but did not complete, university.

While working in Indianapolis, an accident that almost blinded him changed his life for one of adventure.

He began with a 1,000-mile trek to the Gulf Coast, then a voyage to California, whose boundless diversity appealed to his soul.

After several years of living wild in the Sierras, in 1880, aged 42, he married the daughter of a fruit farmer in Martinez and settled to civilised life. . . although the call of the wild drew him back to his beloved mountains again and again.

Because his house at 4202 Alhambra Avenue (now his museum) was the only one Muir ever really called home, Martinez is now twinned with Dunbar in one of the more curious examples of such connections.

Sitting on the Carquinez Strait, where fresh waters of Suisun Bay merge with the salt of San Francisco Bay, Martinez is as old as California itself, being on the road to the Gold Rush.

When Muir was helping manage the orchards, the place was rural, with barely 1,500 inhabitants, at a time when Dunbar was over twice that size.

But, even while Muir was still living there, things changed.

A refinery opened in 1908. By the time of his death in 1914, there were three, and by the mid-20th century, five.

They are all along the shore of Suisun Bay, some distance from downtown, now the seat of Contra Costa County (population 1,532,000).

In the last century, Martinez has become Falkirk-sized (35,800) – four times the size of Dunbar.

John Muir’s legacy in America’s magnificent national parks and widespread environmental activism may be cited when COP comes to Glasgow later this year.

Just what Muir would have thought of his adopted home becoming the Bay Area’s Grangemouth we will never know – but I suspect if we knew we couldn’t print it!