Dunbar is a town on the southeast coast of Scotland, approximately 28 miles (45 km) east of Edinburgh and 28 miles (45 km) from the English Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Dunbar is a former Royal Burgh and gave its name to an ecclesiastical and civil parish. The parish extends around 7½ miles east to west and is 3½ miles deep at greatest extent (12 x 5.5 kilometres) or 11¼ square miles (c. 3000 hectares) and contains the villages of West Barns, Belhaven, East Barns (abandoned) and several hamlets and farms.
Its strategic position gave rise to a history full of incident and strife but Dunbar has become a quiet dormitory town popular with workers in nearby Edinburgh, who find it an affordable alternative to the capital itself. Until the 1960s the population of the town was little more than 3,500.
The town is served by Dunbar railway station. Dunbar is home to the Dunbar Lifeboat Station, the second oldest RNLI station in Scotland.
The name Dunbar has Brythonic roots and means approximately 'summit-fort', which gives an indication to its origins. To the north of the present High Street an area of open ground called Castle Park preserves almost exactly the hidden perimeter of an iron age promontory fort. The early settlement was a principal centre of the people known to the Romans as Votadini and it may have grown in importance when the great hillfort of Traprain Law was abandoned at the end of the 5th century AD. Dunbar was subsumed into Anglian Northumbria as that kingdom expanded in the 6th century and is believed to be synonymous with the Dynbaer of Eddius around 680AD, the first time that it appears in the written record. The influential Northumbrian monk and scholar St. Cuthbert, born around 630 AD, was probably from around Dunbar. While still a boy, and employed as a shepherd, one night he had a vision of the soul of Aidan being carried to heaven by angels and thereupon went to the monastery of Old Melrose and became a monk.
It was then a king's vill and prison to Bishop Wilfrid. As a royal holding of the kings of Northumbria, the economy centred on the collecting of food renders and the administration of the northern (now Scottish) portion of that kingdom. It was the base of a senior royal official, a reeve (later sheriff), and, perhaps, in the 7th century a dynasty of ealdormen or sub-kings who held northern Northumbria against Pictish encroachment.
