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., a lot of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath as well as its Strath. Dunbeath has a very abundant archaeological landscape, the site of countless Iron Age brochs and an early middle ages monastic site (see Alex Morrison's archaeological survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn composed: "These small straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate appeal. In boyhood we are familiar with every square lawn of it. We include it literally as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout and also a periodically noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken as well as disappearing rabbit scuts, a wealth of wild flower and small bird life, the rising hawk, the unanticipated roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the individual who as soon as lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past and the present kept in a moment of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is an area museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old town school.
