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), writer of The Silver Darlings, Highland River etc., a lot of whose novels are embeded in Dunbeath and also its Strath. Dunbeath has a really abundant archaeological landscape, the website of various Iron Age brochs and a very early middle ages reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's historical survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn composed: "These little 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 and our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, pools with trout and also a sometimes visible salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and also disappearing bunny scuts, a riches of wild flower and also little bird life, the soaring hawk, the unanticipated roe, the ancient graveyard, thoughts of the people that when lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past and the present kept in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Bit Of Britain', 1941.). There is a neighborhood museum/landscape analysis centre at the old town college.