EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Donald Trump touted his Scottish roots on a visit to his late mother's childhood at the start of the week, as he prepared to defend a plan to build a $2 billion golf resort complex here.

Trump told journalists his mother had inspired him to stay with the project, planned near Aberdeen on the country's east coast, despite opposition from environmentalists.

"If it weren't for my mother would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes," he said. "It is really easy to find a nice piece of land to do something nice on, but Scotland is special and I wanted to do something special for my mother."

Trump is planning two golf courses, a five-star hotel and hundreds of houses on the site, but green campaigners say the construction would hurt the area's delicate sand dunes, home to a number of bird species.

Trump was due to give evidence yesterday at a public inquiry into the proposed development.

The real estate mogul has not visited his mother's former home in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, 50 miles off Scotland's northwest coast, since he was a child. But he denied he was using the family trip to promote his plan, saying he had simply been too busy to return until now.

"You do reach a certain point in life where you think about where you came from, where your parents are from, and in this case I've been waiting to do this for years," he said Monday.

Mary MacLeod Trump died in August 2000 at age 88. She was born on the Isle of Lewis in 1912 and met Fred C. Trump while visiting New York in the 1930s.