Glencoe Folk Museum

Glencoe Folk Museum occupies two refurbished eighteenth-century heather-thatched cottages in Glencoe village, among the oldest surviving buildings in a glen whose name is inseparable from one of the most notorious episodes in Scottish history: the Massacre of Glencoe of February 1692, when soldiers of the Earl of Argyll's regiment, after being billeted with and hosted by members of Clan MacDonald for nearly two weeks under the traditional Highland obligations of hospitality, turned on their hosts in the early hours of the morning on government orders, killing dozens of MacDonalds in a betrayal that shocked contemporary Scotland and has remained a byword for treachery in Highland memory ever since.

Founded and run by women since the 1960s, a distinctive institutional history for a small Highland museum of this vintage, Glencoe Folk Museum has built its collection around the massacre and its surrounding Jacobite-era context, while extending well beyond this single dramatic event to document the everyday domestic, agricultural and social life of Glencoe's crofting community across several centuries. The two thatched cottages that house the museum are themselves significant historical artefacts, representing a vernacular Highland building tradition that has almost entirely vanished elsewhere in Scotland, and their survival and restoration gives visitors direct physical contact with the kind of buildings the massacre's victims and their descendants would have lived in.

The museum's collections include domestic implements, agricultural tools, and textiles illustrating the practical rhythms of Highland crofting life, alongside material relating to the wider Jacobite risings that shaped Highland politics and society across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which the Glencoe Massacre forms one particularly dark and consequential episode. This combination of a single infamous historical event with the broader texture of ordinary Highland domestic life gives the museum's displays an unusual depth, ensuring that Glencoe's identity is not reduced solely to the massacre even as that event remains central to any understanding of the glen's history and continuing cultural significance.

The museum is currently closed for a major £3 million redevelopment project that began with groundworks in 2026, restoring and re-thatching the historic cottages while adding fully accessible, environmentally controlled indoor exhibition space that will allow the collection to be properly displayed for the first time; the project has already raised the great majority of its funding target and is anticipated to reopen the museum to visitors in spring 2027. Once reopened, the redeveloped museum is expected to offer significantly improved visitor facilities while preserving the historic character of the original thatched cottages that have housed the collection since the 1960s.