Highland Folk Museum in Scotland, Scottish Museums

Highland Folk Museum in Cairngorms National Park

A trip to the Highland Folk Museum is a treat for any family. It is picturesque place where visitors are encouraged to interact with their environment to the greatest degree possible and older ones are encouraged to look to the past with admiration for those who came before us and who solved their problems with the simplest and most effective methods possible. The entire museum is situated within the boundaries of the vast Cairngorms National Park though there are two different museum sights which can be visited. The first is the one in Kingussie and the other is at Newtonmore which is roughly four kilometers away.

Most visitors prefer to start their visit at the Kingussie branch of the museum. Opened in 1944, this is the oldest and most well-established part of the museum. It houses a number of the museum’s core collections and features the ‘Blackhouse’ which is noted as being Britain’s oldest ‘re-created’ building. The Kingussie Highland Folk Museum gives visitors interesting insight into a number of Scottish highland farming traditions and practices which, though seldom seen today, played a very big role in Scotland in the past. The museum at Newtonmore is a livelier place to visit and is generally more popular with children. It was opened in 1995 as a living history site and it features a number of re-constructed buildings. These buildings take the form of a township from the 1700s, a working farm from the 1940s and live interpretation of the various activities that took place at these different places. Children can often interact with the animals and there are a wide range of visitor facilities for your convenience.

The Highland Folk Museum was established with the aim of preserving and recording aspects of Highland life – mainly that from the 1700s on. The people of the highlands have long enjoyed rich cultural traditions that should not be ignored, but instead should be carefully preserved so as to educate each generation about the many challenges that their forefathers faced and dealt with through trial and error. It is a memorial to the persistence and patience of these early pioneers and certainly makes one feel more affinity to those of bygone eras.

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