Adventures in the Cairngorms

We stayed in our first Scottish town, Kingussie, for 2 nights. This meant that we only had one full day to explore the area. On that Friday morning, we went to the Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore. It was really cool because it wasn't like a normal museum. Everything was set up, like a living history museum. They had rebuilt all of the buildings, and there was a village and school house that had people dressed up like they were from that time! It was really fun to see.
First we saw buildings from the 1930s. Then, we hiked to a village from the 1700s. The higher (though still low) ranked people had bigger houses, which they shared with their cows! The very poor people only had really small houses, with barely enough room to fit their whole family. The houses that we went into were sooooo smoky, we couldn't say in there, and we dont know how they were lived in!


(Mom's note: One of the things that was amazing about the reconstructed village in this museum was that they have full time staff whose job it is to build and maintain all the structures and tools they have there, and those people are onsite working, available to answer questions. The day we were there, the gentleman who had overseen all the buildings in the village was making the walls of another structure, piling turf slices over a wooden frame, getting it ready to be thatched with the huge piles of dried heather piled on the ground. Even the tools they use in the museum are mostly made there: the small wooden bowl they brought out for the grain Samantha had ground on the stone grinder was carved by hand on a primitive lathe they showed us.)



How Scotland was in the 1930s...








The school house...







The weavers shop...









The tailor's workshop...



18th century village...

Samantha loved working the stone grain grinder. I kept telling her it was time to go and she just had to do 'one more batch' then one more and one more...

After the museum, we drove out into the country, and saw the Ruthven Barracks, which my dad already posted about. Then we kept driving to a little tea and cake place that had been recommended to us. It was at a beautiful nursery, and the cakes were a wonderful lunch! :) We each got our own slice that we soon gobbled up...







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Location:Grassmarket,Edinburgh,United Kingdom