Get Dunbeath Pro’s

Dunbeath is a town in south-east Caithness, Scotland on the A9 road. It was the birthplace of Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), author of The Silver Darlings, Highland River and so on, a number of whose books are embeded in Dunbeath and also its Strath. Dunbeath has a very rich archaeological landscape, the site of numerous Iron Age brochs as well as an early medieval monastic site (see Alex Morrison’s historical study, “Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape”.) Of Dunbeath’s landscape, Gunn composed: “These tiny straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate appeal. In boyhood we are familiar with every square lawn of it. We include it physically as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, pools with trout as well as an occasionally noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and vanishing bunny scuts, a wealth of wild flower and little bird life, the rising hawk, the unanticipated roe, the old graveyard, thoughts of the people that as soon as lived much inland in straths and also hollows, the past and today held in a minute of day-dream.” (‘My Little Britain’, 1941.). There is an area museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old town institution.