Highland Folk Museum goes virtual

A new series of virtual tours around historic buildings at the Highland Folk Museum has been launched, writes Sandy Neil.

The attraction has created a series of 360-degree digital tours as a new way to explore five of its unique buildings and the objects within.

Project officer Helen Pickles said: 'Virtual tours are a great way for us to present some of our most iconic buildings and collections.

'Each location can be enjoyed on different levels – online visitors might want to just have a quick browse and get a feel for the buildings, or for those who want to dive deeper and learn about the history and stories hidden within, there is plenty of information to read, watch and absorb.'

The five locations that will be featured at the Newtonmore site are the Blackhouse, Knockbain School, Boleskine Shinty Pavilion, the Travellers’ Summer Encampment, and Lochanhully House.

The museum has used the digital platform ThingLink to create the self-guided tours and can be viewed from anywhere in the world.

With 360-degree photographs of the building interiors, visitors can look around and explore, with information and images appearing on tags around the building. There is even a feature that allows the text to be read aloud or translated into numerous languages.

High Life Highland board director Mark Tate said: 'I doubt Isabel F Grant would have conceived of our heritage being brought to life in this way when she started collecting and protecting items that told the social history of the Highlands back in the 1930s.

'Many of the items from the collection need to be kept in a dry, secure and stable environment but thanks to digital technology, we’re now able to showcase some of these very special objects in the buildings where they once would have belonged.' The first building to be launched online is the Hebridean Blackhouse, one of the iconic buildings of the Highland Folk Museum.

The Blackhouse is a recreation of a thatched home from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides; buildings like this have been lived in for hundreds of years, in some cases up to the mid-1900s.

This was one of the three houses that the founder of the museum, Isabel F Grant, had built in the 1940s when the museum was in Kingussie. The building was relocated, stone by stone, to the Newtonmore site in 2013.

This Hebridean-style building is constructed to bear up to the weather and the force of Atlantic gales. Small windows, six foot thick stone walls, the gable end facing the prevailing wind, and a weighted-down thatched roof with no overhang all helped to create an effective shelter from the elements and to protect the residents inside.

The simple house comprises a byre at one end, where the cattle would be housed over the cold winter months, and a central room which was the living and sleeping area, with a fire in the middle of the room. There is no chimney, so the peat smoke filters out through the thatched roof. The 'ben' or good room at the far end was often used as a bedroom.

Isabel F Grant, in her 1961 book Highland Folk Ways, wrote of blackhouses: 'They gave the nightly warmth and shelter that was craved by men and women who spent their days largely out of doors, had few worldly possessions and were used to living in close association.'

It is thought that the name 'blackhouse' did not originate, as is commonly assumed, from the blackened interiors due to the peat smoke, but to distinguish them from a later style of improved house which were white-washed and known as 'whitehouses'.