About
The Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore in the Cairngorms National Park is Scotland's first open-air museum and one of its most extraordinary cultural institutions. Founded in 1935 by the remarkable Dr Isabel Frances Grant, the museum was born of a single urgent and prescient vision: to collect and preserve the material culture of traditional Highland life before it vanished forever in the wake of the Clearances, the collapse of traditional economy, and the rapid modernisation of the twentieth century.
Dr Grant — a pioneering historian and the first woman to found a museum in Scotland — began collecting Highland objects from farms and cottages across the region in the 1920s and 1930s, recognising that the world she was documenting was disappearing at extraordinary speed. Her collection formed the nucleus of what is now one of Scotland's most important ethnographic collections, and her instinct that these objects could only be fully understood in authentic built contexts led directly to the open-air museum concept she pioneered.
The museum today occupies an eighty-acre site set in the beautiful Highland scenery between Newtonmore and Kingussie, within the Cairngorms National Park. Across this landscape, over thirty historic buildings spanning four centuries of Highland life have been authentically reconstructed or relocated — some brick by brick from their original locations. These range from a seventeenth-century township of turf-walled longhouses, shared by people and livestock, to a late-Victorian shooting lodge, a 1930s school, a shepherd's bothy, an eighteenth-century mill, a joiner's workshop, and a blacksmith's forge.
The buildings are furnished and equipped with period-authentic objects — the actual tools, furniture, and domestic equipment used by Highland people across the centuries — and are sometimes staffed by costumed interpreters demonstrating traditional crafts: spinning wool on a hand spindle, weaving on a traditional loom, making candles, baking on an open hearth, and practising the agricultural techniques of the pre-mechanised Highlands.
What makes the Highland Folk Museum unlike almost any other museum experience is its commitment to showing Highland life as it actually was across the full social spectrum — from the poorest townships of the pre-Clearance period to the more prosperous farms, cottages, and workshops of later centuries. Walking between buildings, visitors experience four centuries of Highland history not as a series of artefacts behind glass but as a lived landscape of human habitation and work.
Categories:
Highlights
Seventeenth-Century Township
The most atmospheric and historically significant group of buildings on the site is the reconstructed seventeenth-century township — a cluster of turf-walled longhouses of the type that housed the majority of Highland families before the Clearances. In these low, dark, thick-walled buildings, people and their livestock shared the same roof through the long Highland winters, the animals' body heat helping to warm the human quarters.
The buildings are furnished with period objects and are sometimes inhabited by costumed interpreters demonstrating the domestic life of pre-Clearance Highland communities — weaving, cooking over an open central hearth, and spinning by firelight.
Craft Demonstrations
Throughout the museum season, costumed demonstrators practise traditional Highland crafts in the historic buildings, providing a living history experience that cannot be replicated behind glass cases. Demonstrations include hand-spinning wool on a drop spindle, weaving on a traditional loom, candle-making using tallow and rush wicks, open-hearth baking, and the traditional agricultural techniques of ridge-and-furrow cultivation and haymaking.
Visitors can watch closely, ask questions, and sometimes try their hand at the crafts themselves — making the museum an extraordinarily direct experience of pre-industrial life.
1930s School
Among the most charming and popular of the museum's reconstructed buildings is the 1930s Highland school — a simple single-room schoolhouse with its original wooden desks, blackboard, cast-iron stove, and educational materials exactly as they would have appeared in a rural Highland primary school during the interwar period.
Costumed teachers sometimes conduct demonstration lessons in period style, giving children and adults alike a vivid experience of Highland rural education in an era when Gaelic speakers were still discouraged from using their language in the classroom. Enormously popular with school visiting groups.
Dr Isabel Grant's Original Collection
The museum's founding collection — assembled by Dr Isabel Frances Grant from the 1920s onwards — forms the core of what is now one of the most important ethnographic collections of Highland material culture in existence.
Dr Grant was the first woman to found a museum in Scotland and a pioneer of social history long before it became fashionable in academic circles. Her insight that objects of everyday Highland life deserved preservation and scholarly attention led to the creation of Am Fasgadh (The Shelter) in 1935, which grew into the Highland Folk Museum.
The collection includes furniture, textiles, tools, and domestic objects spanning four centuries of Highland life.
Collections
Four Centuries of Highland Life
The museum's main interpretive narrative — presented across the entire eighty-acre site through the reconstructed buildings, furnished interiors, and demonstrators — traces Highland life from the seventeenth century through to the mid-twentieth century.
Dr Isabel Grant and the Founding of Am Fasgadh
Indoor interpretation on the museum's founder, her pioneering work in Highland social history, and the development of the collection and site from 1935 to the present.
Highland Material Culture Collection
The founding collection of Highland domestic objects, tools, textiles, and furniture assembled by Dr Grant — displayed in context throughout the historic buildings and in the main exhibition building.
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.