West Highland Museum in Fort William
The West Highland Museum (WHM) is a small regional museum located in Fort William, Scotland, in the heart of the Lochaber area of the West Highlands. Established in 1922, it is one of the oldest museums in the Scottish Highlands. The museum is housed in a Category B listed historic building (the former Old Fort William Linen Bank) and has a collection spanning archaeology, social history, and modern industry, with a special emphasis on the Jacobite Risings of the 18th century and on the WWII Commando training that took place locally. Many objects in WHM’s care are rare or iconic – for example, the “Secret Portrait” of Bonnie Prince Charlie, an 18th-century optical illusion painting, and artifacts belonging to figures like Flora MacDonald. The museum also stewards the Alexander Carmichael Collection, a set of Gaelic material culture objects gathered in the 19th–20th centuries, which reflects the rich Gaelic heritage of the Highlands. In addition, WHM holds an oral archive of 1950s-era recordings of Highland life and folklore, preserving stories and oral history from the Lochaber region. This blend of tangible and intangible heritage defines WHM’s cultural profile.
Within the HERITALISE project, WHM serves as Demonstration Site 1, providing a pilot use case to develop and test digitization and digital engagement strategies on a smaller museum scale. With only 4 permanent staff and around 60,000 in-person visitors per year, WHM represents a resource-constrained institution that still reaches a large audience. It has no dedicated in-house IT department or digitization team, which makes it an ideal testbed for HERITALISE’s innovative but user-friendly tools. The idea is that if solutions can be implemented and sustained at WHM, they can be replicated by similar small museums across Europe. The WHM pilot focuses on the Highland cultural landscape and Gaelic heritage, aligning with HERITALISE’s goals of engaging local communities and preserving endangered intangible heritage. In practice, this means digitizing not only individual objects but also larger contexts (buildings, landscapes, oral traditions) that frame those objects. The role of WHM in the project is thus to demonstrate how a “Museum of the Highlands” can be extended into the digital realm – connecting artifacts, historical sites, and Gaelic culture through technology – and to validate the project’s tools in a real-world scenario.
This map shows the origin of items from the West Highland Museums’ themes of Jacobite and Highland Life.
JACOBITE
The word Jacobite comes from Jacobus, the latin form of James, so literally meant a supporter of the line of James. James VI of Scotland, from the House of Stewart (or Stuart, the French spelling) was crowned King of England in 1603 and the Stuarts reigned over both Scotland and England until the death of Queen Anne in 1714.
HIGHLAND LIFE
The rugged landscape and geographical isolation of much of the Scottish Highlands made it a relatively inaccessible place for much of its political and cultural history. With this, however, came the evolution of its own very unique traditions, cultural life, and folklore.