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 and so on, a lot of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath as well as its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely abundant historical landscape, the website of many Iron Age brochs and an early middle ages reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's historical survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn wrote: "These small straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate elegance. In boyhood we get to know every square lawn of it. We encompass 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 and disappearing rabbit scuts, a riches of wild flower as well as tiny bird life, the soaring hawk, the unforeseen roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the people who once lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past as well as the present kept in a moment of day-dream." ('My Little Bit Of Britain', 1941.). There is a community museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old village school.