NC500 - new Highland museum to tell story of Clearances, coal and the 'Electric City' of the north

Brora in Sutherland is making a fresh mark on the map with a new museum which is being built after a herculean effort by the community to get its history told.

Ground will soon be broken on a new museum for the Highlands after years of work by a community passionate about its history.

The Clyne Heritage Society in Brora is due to begin work on the transformation of a derelict schoolhouse in the village where thousands of years of the past will soon be brought together under one roof.

Artefacts will chart Brora’s story from the Bronze Age to the Sutherland Clearances and the impact of coal mined on the fringes of the village, which in turn sparked manufacturing on many fronts and earned Brora the title ‘Electric City’.

An impression of the new Clyne Heritage Society museum at Brora, which is due to be open by summer 2025. PIC: Clyne Heritage Society.

Sitting on the North Coast 500 driving route, it is hoped the attraction will change Brora from a “drive through” village to a destination in its own right.

Ground will be broken on the new museum on March 25, with an estimated build time of around a year.

Dr Nick Lindsay, chair of Clyne Heritage Society, said it had been “hard to keep the smile of his face” since the last £1.95m piece of funding from the UK Government’s Levelling Up fund was awarded before Christmas.

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The society has been working on the £4.5m redevelopment plans for the past six years but met repeated obstacles on the way, from Brexit to the pandemic.

Dr Lindsay said: “It is really remarkable what we have been able to do here. It has been frustrating at times but we got there thanks to the hard work of the community and the professionalism of our advisers .

“We are right on the North Coast 500 and we want to make Brora more of a destination than a drive through. We want visitors to stay here a little longer as Brora is an absolute hidden gem.”

Dr Lindsay said the North Coast 500 driving route was essential to the success of the museum and pointed to the increase in visitor numbers at nearby Dunrobin Castle, which rose from 62,000 in 2014 to 140,000 last year.

"If we could get a small percentge of that, we would be delighted,” he added.

One of the subjects to be told in the museum is the Sutherland Clearances, when tenants were forced out their homes by the factors of the Duke of Sutherland, of Dunrobin Castle, to make way for large-scale sheep farming.

Domestic items recovered from excavations of pre-Clearance longhouses at Strath Brora show some of the things left behind, such as a bone comb, pottery, buttons and coins.

Tenants were moved to Brora and, without enough land for subsistence farming, the Duke had a ready-made labour force to work his coal mine and the brickworks, distillery and saltworks that it powered.

The coal mine and brickworks were later owned by Thomas Hunter, who also took on the mill which he powered by electricity generated on site. He sold his surplus electricity to those who could afford it as early as 1913.

Street lights were also powered and the village became known as Electric City, 35 years before the arrival of mains electricity.