Dunbeath
Dunbeath is a village 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, a number of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath and also its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely abundant archaeological landscape, the website of countless Iron Age brochs and also an early medieval monastic site (see Alex Morrison's historical survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn created: "These tiny straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate charm. In boyhood we get to know every square lawn of it. We incorporate it physically and also our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout and a periodically noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and vanishing rabbit scuts, a wide range of wild blossom and also little bird life, the soaring hawk, the unexpected roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the folk who as soon as lived much inland in straths as well as hollows, the past as well as today held in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is an area museum/landscape analysis centre at the old town school.