Perth Museum and Art Gallery

The Perth Museum and Art Gallery is located in Perth, Scotland on George Street and is one of the oldest museums in Britain. The actual building that the Museum and Gallery is situated in dates back as far as 1824 and today it is the main museum in Perth.

Here at the Museum you will find a large collection of specimens that have undergone a process to preserve them. The collection is made up of birds and mammals that have either died naturally, were road casualties or died when they flew into a window and by fieldwork that has been donated to the Museum. This allows visitors to see what species can be found and what the geology is like specifically in the Perthshire and Kinross-shire region. A lot of information has been researched and provided for people visiting for the purpose of educating them.

The building that the Perth Museum and Gallery is located in may be old but the collection found here has been put together since 1784 when the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perth was first founded. The collection was first collected for the Perthshire Society of Natural Science museum but with its closure in 1902 the collections were then moved to the Perth town museum.

Although the focus is specifically on the Perthshire and Kinross-shire region collections of zoological, geological and botanical nature have also been collected from overseas as well as from other parts of Britain. If you tally up all the collections at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery you will see in total 150,000 specimens of which some belong to collections that are of utmost importance nationally. This includes Perthshire plants; Lower Devonian fossil fish, willow collection, British hemiptera and mollusca.

The Perth Museum and Art Gallery keeps an excellent biological record on wildlife sightings that have been occurred in the Perthshire and Kinross-shire area. There are as many as fifteen thousand records in the database that have been taken in. Another impressive collection that you must look out for is the Perthshire Herbarium, which is made up of over 14,000 pressed wild flowering plants and rare or extinct plants in Perthshire.

The Perth Museum opens everyday except Sunday from 10 am till 5 pm with limited parking on the street or nearby. The Museum offers Education and Children’s Services to keep pre-school children and older ones entertained. The Museum is easily accessible for those using wheelchairs but unfortunately there is no specific parking allocated to those with disabilities.

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