West Highland Museum

The West Highland Museum is one of the oldest museums in the Highlands. It was founded in 1922 by a group of local enthusiasts led by Victor Hodgson, who had neither a collection nor a building to display it in. Victor Tylston Hodgson was born in 1875 at Welcombe Harpenden, Herts., the son of Henry Tylston, a director and for a time Vice Chairman of the Midland Railway.

Visiting The West Highland Museum couldn't be easier. We are situated just off the main pedestrianised High Street in Fort William at Cameron Square, a ten-minute walk from both the bus station and the rail station. Street parking in Fort William is very limited but the town's main public car parks are all within a 5-10 minute walk from the Museum.

Polished stone axes were the oldest archaeological objects found in the West Highland region, and date from the Neolithic period (around 2000BCE). The use of metal axes became widespread soon afterwards, and the museum has examples of these, as well as the heads of the earlier stone axes.

Our collection includes ancient pottery and metalwork, arrowheads and stonework, salvage from the wreck of a Spanish Galleon, and clothing and artefacts from a 1500-year old crannog site.

The town of Fort William's origins are military. The area itself, at the westernmost end of the Great Glen fault that runs from Inverness, has historically been of great strategic and political importance to the control of the Highlands. Much of the area's more renowned military stories revolve around the events leading up to and arising from the Jacobite risings of the mid-eighteenth century.

The Scottish Highlands as a region is now world famous for its extraordinary landscape and its appeal for travellers as a place for fresh air, down-to-earth hospitality, and a wealth of outdoor pursuits - from hill-walking and golf to white-water rafting and mountain-biking.

Inverness on the east coast, for example, is bidding to be the fastest growing city in the United Kingdom, as people flock to take advantage of the many benefits living in the Highlands has to offer.The interest in the Highlands as a destination of choice for tourists and house-movers is a relatively recent one, however.