Dunbeath Castle by scottishkennyg Via Flickr: The author Neil M Gunn was born in the Caithness village of Dunbeath on November 8th 1891.
Gunn was a novelist, critic and dramatist working at the height of the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Gunn choose to write largely in English.
Gunn worked in the Civil Service in London and Edinburgh before returning to the live and work in the Highlands, his first novel, The Grey Coast, was published in 1926, but it wasn’t until 1937 and the success of Highland River, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, that he was able to give up his job with Customs and Excise to write full-time.
Highland River marked the end of a trilogy of novels exploring the history of the Highlands, following Sun Circle and Butcher’s Broom. The following year Gunn sold his house in Inverness and bought a twenty-seven foot motor boat, The Thistle, and took his wife and brother on a three-month sailing cruise around the islands of Scotland. His final book was the autobiography The Atom of Delight, published in 1956. He wrote a number of essays, which have been collected into anthologies.
Gunn died in 1973, and a memorial sculpture, seen in the pic called, Kenn and the Salmon, was unveiled at Dunbeath Harbour in 1991. Kenn is the central figure in Gunn's novel 'Highland River', carrying home the huge salmon he caught caught with his bare hands in the Well Pool beside the Telford Bridge over the Dunbeath River.