Dunbeath
Dunbeath is a town in south-east Caithness, Scotland on the A9 road. It was the birth place of Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), writer of The Silver Darlings, Highland River etc., most of whose stories are set in Dunbeath and its Strath. Dunbeath has a really abundant archaeological landscape, the site of countless Iron Age brochs and an early middle ages reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's archaeological study, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn composed: "These tiny straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate charm. In boyhood we learn more about every square backyard of it. We include it literally and our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, pools with trout as well as an occasionally visible salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and going away rabbit scuts, a wealth of wild blossom as well as little bird life, the skyrocketing hawk, the unanticipated roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the people that when lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past as well as the present held in a moment of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a community museum/landscape analysis centre at the old village college.