The village of Dunning is an ancient settlement, rich in history. 

Human settlement in and around Dunning can be traced back some five thousand years, with a number of sites, remains and artefacts unearthed from the neolothic, bronze and iron ages. An Iron Age fort was built on Dun Knock (now locally known as 'the Dunnock'), and it is thought that the name Dunning originates from the Gaelic Dùnainn, which means 'little fort'. Although there are no visible remains of the fort today, you can still see part of the rampart and a ditch of a 1st-century Roman Camp at nearby Kincladie Wood. 

St Serf

Dunning is associated with St Serf - also known as Saint Serbán or Servanus - who was a son of Eliud, the King of Canaan, and was born around the year 500 in Roman-occupied Arabia.  Arriving in Rome as a young man, he became a man of great standing within the early Christian church. He became a missionary, spreading the Christian message amont the Picts. Upon reaching Scotland, St Serf is said to have founded the town of Culross in present-day Fife and a priory on a Loch Leven island, now St Serf’s Inch. 

Legend tells that St Serf travelled to Dunning where the villagers were being terrorised by a deadly foe: ‘a dreadful dragon which devoured both men and cattle and kept the district in continuous terror’. Armed only with ‘the breastplate of faith’, St Serf slew the dragon with a single blow of his pastoral staff and thus saved the villagers from the threat of future attacks. 

​Although St Serf was buried in Culross, he is believed to have died in Dunning, where, some 600 years after his death St. Serf's Church was built in his honour.

Dupplin Cross

Dunning is also associated with Constantine, King of the Picts from 789 to 820, who ruled from a palace at Forteviot, three miles north-east of Dunning. 

The Dupplin Cross is the only physical remnant of the palace at Forteviot, a carved, free-standing, stone Pictish cross, about 2.5 metres high. It spent the best part of the last 1200 years on a hillside overlooking the site of the palace, being eroded by the elements. 

In 1999 it was removed for conservation, and since 2002 it has been on display in category A-listed St Serf's church,​ in a beautiful setting beneath the tower.

Maggie Wall's Monument

Another famous local monument is the cairn to Maggie Wall, which bears the inscription 'Maggie Wall burnt here 1657 as a witch'. 

Although there is some dispute over whether Maggie Wall actually existed, records show that six more witches were executed in Dunning in 1663, in Kincladie wood, on the other side of the village.

Straw House and The Jacobites

And speaking of fire, at 9pm on the bitterly cold winter's evening of 28 January 1716, following their defeat at the Battle of Sheriffmuir the retreating Jacobite army was commanded to adopt a scorch earth policy, destroying all stocks of fodder and burning all of the houses. 

The only house in Dunning not to be burnt to the ground was 'Straw House', so called because the old woman who lived there set fire to damp straw, tricking the soldiers into believing it had already been set alight. 

Dunning rebuilt

By the 1830s, John, 8th baron Rollo, had rebuilt and expanded Dunning with rows of weaver's cottages, extending it into what is now the adjacent village of Newton of Pitcarns. The population peaked at around 2200 people in the mid-19th Century, before dropping away as the weaving industry declined.