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), writer of The Silver Darlings, Highland River and so on, most of whose novels are set in Dunbeath and its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely rich historical landscape, the website of many Iron Age brochs and also an early middle ages reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's archaeological study, "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 learn more about every square lawn of it. We incorporate it physically as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout as well as an occasionally noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken as well as going away rabbit scuts, a riches of wild flower and also little bird life, the soaring hawk, the unforeseen roe, the ancient graveyard, ideas of the folk that as soon as lived much inland in straths and also hollows, the past and also the present kept in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a neighborhood museum/landscape analysis centre at the old village school.
