Dunbeath
Dunbeath is a town in south-east Caithness, Scotland on the A9 road. It was the native home of Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), author of The Silver Darlings, Highland River and so on, much of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath and its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely rich archaeological landscape, the website of countless Iron Age brochs as well as a very early medieval reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's archaeological survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn composed: "These tiny straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate appeal. In boyhood we get to know every square backyard of it. We encompass it physically and our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout and also a sometimes noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken as well as vanishing rabbit scuts, a wide range of wild flower and also small bird life, the soaring hawk, the unforeseen roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the folk who as soon as lived much inland in straths and also hollows, the past and today held in a moment of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a community museum/landscape analysis centre at the old village institution.
