Museum of Banff

The Banff Silver Collection

The great majority of Aberdeenshire Council's collection of Banff silver is displayed here, and it is the largest collection of Banff silver anywhere in Scotland, with half of all the known Banff silversmiths represented. Scottish provincial silver — work made in burghs beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow by locally established goldsmiths, marked with their own town punches — is a specialist field with a serious following among collectors and historians, and Banff is one of its most important centres.

That such a collection is held in the burgh where the work was made, rather than dispersed to a national museum, is genuinely unusual.

The Silver Bullet Teapot

Among the outstanding individual pieces in the silver collection is a bullet teapot, so called for its rounded spherical body, possibly made by George Leith during a visit to Banff in 1700 and described as an exceptionally fine example of Scottish provincial silver. Teapots of this date are rare in any context, since tea was then still an expensive novelty and the vessels made for it were correspondingly precious, and a provincial example of this quality from the very beginning of the eighteenth century is a considerable thing for a small burgh museum to hold.

Thomas Edward's Natural History Collection

Thomas Edward was appointed curator of Banff Museum in 1852 and remains the most celebrated figure associated with it. A working man who pursued natural history in whatever hours his trade left him, often at night and in considerable hardship, he assembled specimens of real scientific value and became one of the more remarkable figures in nineteenth-century Scottish science.

Some of his specimens are still on display in the museum he curated, which gives the collection a continuity that very few natural history displays anywhere can claim.

The Deskford Carnyx

The museum displays an electrotype copy of the Deskford Carnyx, a Celtic war trumpet some two thousand years old found in Banffshire.

The carnyx was a tall bronze horn with a boar's-head bell, carried upright above the heads of an army so that its sound and its appearance both worked on the enemy, and the Deskford find is among the most striking objects to survive from Iron Age Scotland. Seeing a copy in the district where the original was found connects the object to its landscape in a way a national gallery display cannot.

Electrotypes were the standard nineteenth-century method of sharing important finds, and this one lets Banffshire keep its most famous object in view.