There are a few visible signs of damp, although it often goes undetected. However, in older or empty properties, this made become detectable through its smell. These include peeling paint and wallpaper, crumbling plaster, mould growth, black spots or spores on walls and ceilings, and rotting skirting boards and flooring.
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 etc., a lot of whose books are set in Dunbeath and also its Strath. Dunbeath has a really abundant archaeological landscape, the website of numerous Iron Age brochs as well as a very early middle ages monastic site (see Alex Morrison's historical survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn wrote: "These little straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate appeal. In boyhood we learn more about every square yard of it. We incorporate it literally as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout and also a sometimes visible salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and also disappearing rabbit scuts, a riches of wild flower and little bird life, the skyrocketing hawk, the unexpected roe, the ancient graveyard, ideas of the people that as soon as lived far inland in straths and also hollows, the past as well as today kept in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a neighborhood museum/landscape analysis centre at the old town school.
