Museum sights in Dumfries & Galloway
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Ellisland Farm
If you're not Burnsed out, you can head 6 miles northwest of town and visit the farm he leased. It still preserves some original features from when he and his family lived here, and there's a small exhibition. It's signposted off the A76 to Kilmarnock.
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A
Burns House
This is a place of pilgrimage for Burns enthusiasts. It's here that the poet spent the last years of his life, and there are various possessions of his in glass cases, as well as manuscripts and, entertainingly, letters: make sure you have a read.
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B
Robert Burns Centre
A worthwhile Burns exhibition in an old mill on the banks of the River Nith. It tells the story of the poet and Dumfries in the 1790s. The optional audiovisual presentations give more background on Dumfries, and explain the exhibition's contents.
There are more Burns-related sights scattered throughout town; you'll find Robert Burns' mausoleum in the graveyard at St Michael's Kirk, with a grisly account of his reburial on the information panel. At the top of High St is a statue of the bard.
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National Museum of Costume
On the edge of New Abbey, a historic house holds this museum, which gives an overview of what Scots have worn from Victorian times up to the postwar years, boosted by a feature exhibition each year. There are also picturesque gardens.
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Old Blacksmith's Shop
The touristy Old Blacksmith’s Shop complex, has a number of tourist shops and eateries as well as quite an entertaining multilingual exhibition on Gretna Green’s history, with tales of intrigues, elopements, scoundrels, and angry parents arriving minutes too late. There’s a recreation of a blacksmith’s forge,a collection of handsome carriages and a few marriage rooms: you may well run into a modern-day wedding as you walk through.
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C
Stranraer Museum
This museum houses exhibits on local history and you can learn about Stranraer's polar explorers. The highlight is the carved stone pipe from Madagascar.
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Stewartry Museum
There's a certain charm to this higgledy-piggledy old-fashioned local history museum. There's everything from coronation teacups to lumps of local granite to stuffed fish. Reduced hours in winter.
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