New museum for the Central Southern Uplands

A new digital ‘ecomuseum’ is going to be created, covering the communities of Moffat, Tweedsmuir, Ettrick and Yarrow and the connecting valleys.

An Ecomuseum is derived from the French ‘écomusée’, describing a community-based approach to preserving and promoting the heritage and culture of a specific geographical territory and range of activity. The heritage can be material, such as artefacts or buildings, or more abstract, such as personal accounts and remembered stories.

This new ecomuseum will be a community-based heritage repository in digital format, which means it can be constantly updated and added to by the community. This initiative forms part of the Talla-Hartfell Wild Land Area project, run by the Southern Uplands Partnership, working with Visit Moffat, Tweedsmuir Community Company and Ettrick and Yarrow Development Company.

Southern Uplands Partnership Project Leader Donald Greig says:

"This is a unique opportunity to create an online repository, building on work started by the Tweedsmuir Community Company whose ecomuseum is already live. The Talla-Hartfell Ecomuseum will celebrate the unique and distinctive heritage of this historic and beautiful part of the Southern Uplands. We are very keen to hear from anyone who wishes to be involved or who has something to contribute. As the museum will be created digitally, we don’t need to keep hold of anything. Objects can be photographed, stories can be recorded or written down, photographs can be scanned... If you have anything at all which you would like to form part of this museum - objects, tales of times past, photographs, memories – then please get in touch." 

If you have something you would like to share with the museum, please email Donald Greig or contact the Southern Uplands Partnership via Facebook.

Funding for the Ecomuseum has been provided by the Scottish Government through the Rural Communities Testing Change Fund.