Dunbeath
Dunbeath is a village in south-east Caithness, Scotland on the A9 road. It was the birthplace of Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), writer of The Silver Darlings, Highland River etc., a lot of whose books are embeded in Dunbeath and its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely rich historical landscape, the website of various Iron Age brochs and also a very early middle ages monastic site (see Alex Morrison's historical study, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn created: "These small straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate beauty. In boyhood we get to know every square backyard of it. We encompass it physically as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, pools with trout and also a periodically noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken as well as disappearing bunny scuts, a wide range of wild blossom and tiny bird life, the soaring hawk, the unexpected roe, the ancient graveyard, ideas of the individual who once lived far inland in straths and also hollows, the past and the present held in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a neighborhood museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old village school.
