Ullapool Museum

Ullapool Museum runs from a former Thomas Telford parliamentary church on West Argyle Street, built in 1829 to Telford’s standard “T” plan design for the Highland congregations. The building stopped functioning as a church in 1929 and reopened as the Lochbroom Museum in 1996, run since by the Loch Broom Museum Trust as a community-volunteer-supported local archive and exhibition space.

The exhibits tell the “Lochbroom Story”, the history of this corner of Wester Ross across the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The British Fisheries Society founded Ullapool as a planned herring port in 1788, laying out the grid of streets the village still uses today, and the museum carries the original surveyors’ plans alongside boatwork, fishing tools and net-mending displays. A set of detailed scale models of the vessel types worked from the harbour, including the late-nineteenth-century Zulu, runs along one wall.

Other galleries cover the Highland Clearances and emigration (particularly the 1773 voyage of the ship Hector from Ullapool to Pictou in Nova Scotia, the first organised Scottish-Gaelic-speaking emigration to British North America), Gaelic culture and language, religion, and education with a recreated 1960s schoolroom. A modest natural-history room runs marine aquariums of Loch Broom species.

The genealogy desk handles roots-research enquiries from descendants of emigrants tracing back to the area, by appointment and through correspondence year-round.

Open seasonally, typically Easter to October. Current opening hours, exhibition listings and the Hector emigration archive at the Ullapool Museum website.