The Highland Folk Museum is a museum and an open-air visitor attraction in Newtonmore in Badenoch and Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands, United Kingdom.
It is owned by the Highland Council and administered by High Life Highland.
It was founded in 1935 by Dr Isabel Frances Grant (1887–1983).
In 1930, Dr Isabel Frances Grant organised and curated the Highland Exhibition in Inverness, with 2,100 artifacts gathered and exhibited as a national folk museum.[1] Grant founded the Highland Folk Museum in 1935, using a personal legacy to acquire a disused former United Free Church on the island of Iona.[1] [2] Grant recorded 800 visitors in the first summer of opening and 900 the following year.[3] Nicknamed Am Fasgadh (Gaelic for the shelter), the Highland Folk Museum's remit was "…to shelter homely ancient Highland things from destruction".[4]
By 1938, the collection had become too large for its original home. In 1939 the museum moved to larger premises on the mainland at Laggan, Badenoch, a village in the central Highlands. The museum was located here for the next five years. The outbreak of the Second World War, and the resulting restrictions on movement along the west coast and islands of Scotland, meant that Grant was unable to collect during this period. Petrol shortages also reduced the numbers of visitors to the museum. In 1943 Grant purchased Pitmain Lodge, a large Georgian house, together with three acres of land near the train station at Kingussie, about 12miles east of Laggan. On 1 June 1944 the Highland Folk Museum re-opened to the public.[5]
The collections at Kingussie were developed "…to show different aspects of the material setting of life in the Highlands in byegone days,"[4] and included:
The collection also included accounts of superstitions, stories and songs, and home-crafted items including basketry, Barvas ware and treen. Grant also developed a suite of replica buildings at the Kingussie site. This included an Inverness-shire cottage, a Lewis blackhouse and a Highland but-and-ben.[6] The museum used live demonstrations to interpret exhibits for visitors.
When Grant retired in 1954, a Trust formed by the four ancient Scottish universities (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews) took ownership of the Highland Folk Museum and its collections.[7] In 1956, the Trust appointed George ‘Taffy’ Davidson, senior fellow in arts and crafts at the University of Aberdeen, as curator.
In 1975, the Highland Regional Council took over management of the museum.[8] The Council appointed Ross Noble of the Scottish Country Life Museums Trust as curator and a process of modernisation began. Noble introduced open, thematic displays and re-introduced live demonstrations as part of Heritage in Action days for visitors.
In the early 1980s, the museum acquired an 80-acre (32 ha) site at Newtonmore, about 3miles south of Kingussie. The new site consisted of four distinct areas:
The Newtonmore site opened to the public in 1987 and operated in tandem with the museum at Kingussie until the older site closed in 2007.
In 2011, High Life Highland, an arm's-length charity, took over responsibility for the day-to-day running of the Highland Folk Museum. The new Am Fasgadh opened in 2014, and in 2015, the collections at the Highland Folk Museum received official recognition from Museums Galleries Scotland and the Scottish Government as a Nationally Significant Collection.
The museum is primarily made up of three areas that represent and interpret three separate eras of the Scottish Highlands:
The reconstructions are supported by staff members dressed and performing as highlanders. On some days the museum features demonstrations of highland life activities, such as weaving or rope making.[11] Some of the buildings on the museum site were built there, while many have been relocated from other places around the highlands and reconstructed onsite.