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, most of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath and its Strath. Dunbeath has a really abundant archaeological landscape, the site of many 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 created: "These tiny straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate charm. In boyhood we learn more about every square lawn of it. We include it literally and our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, pools with trout as well as a periodically visible salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken as well as vanishing rabbit scuts, a wide range of wild flower and little bird life, the rising hawk, the unanticipated roe, the ancient graveyard, ideas of the people who once lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past and today kept in a minute of day-dream." ('My Little Britain', 1941.). There is a neighborhood museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old town school.