Qualla: Highland Folk Museum

Highland Folk Museum: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dr Isabel Frances Grant called it Am Fasgadh -- Gaelic for "the shelter." In 1935, using money from a personal legacy, she acquired a disused United Free Church on the island of Iona and began collecting the everyday objects of Highland life before they could be lost: spinning wheels, butter churns, peat-cutting tools, the humble equipment of a culture that was vanishing from living memory. Eight hundred visitors came the first summer. The Highland Folk Museum, the first open-air museum in Britain, had begun its long project of preservation.

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highland Folk Museum: A Woman's Mission

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. Grant was a scholar and a practical visionary. In 1930, she had organised the Highland Exhibition in Inverness, assembling 2,100 artefacts into what amounted to a national folk museum. Five years later, the permanent museum she founded on Iona quickly outgrew its church. By 1939 ...

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Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0

Highland Folk Museum: Built and Rebuilt

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 3.0. The current museum site at Newtonmore opened to the public in 1987 and operated alongside the Kingussie location until the older site closed in 2007. Spread across a large outdoor site, it contains both purpose-built reconstructions and historic buildings relocated from elsewhere...

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highland Folk Museum: Living History in Badenoch

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Webb, CC BY-SA 2.0. At the heart of the museum is a reconstructed 1700s township, where staff dressed as Highlanders demonstrate the skills of an 18th-century community. The effect is less theatrical than it sounds. In the reconstructed blackhouse, with its low doorway and central hearth, the peat s...

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Image: Richard Webb | CC BY-SA 2.0