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Museums
on Skye.

It’s 23:01 on Skye.
Isle of Skye

Island life, giants and dinosaurs.

Skye's museums are small, personal and full of surprises. You can step inside thatched cottages to see how crofting families lived not so very long ago, or stand beside a life-size figure of a giant born in the Hebrides. There are fossils and footprints left by dinosaurs on this very coast too. Most are run by people with a real love for the story they're telling, and they make the perfect stop on a wet afternoon or between walks. Check the opening times before you set off, as several close for the winter.

Staffin Dinosaur Museum→
Giant MacAskill Museum→
Skye Museum of Island Life→
Did you know21 hours ago

Angus MacAskill, a Highlander who stood 7 foot 9 inches tall and toured with Barnum's circus, is remembered in a tiny museum at Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye.

Angus was born in 1825 to parents who had moved to the Isle of Berneray, and he later emigrated to Nova Scotia, where he died in 1863. He could lift a full-grown horse, but he was said to speak softly and move with care. Queen Victoria is reported to have called him the 'strongest, stoutest and tallest man to ever enter the palace', and a print of her words hangs in the museum, beside a chair and a bed frame built to his size. Peter MacAskill opened the museum in 1989, and calls Angus his 'great, great, great uncle, I think'.

See Giant MacAskill Museum · Isle of Skye
Museum of the day19 hours ago

Skye Museum of Island Life.

Eight thatched cottages at Kilmuir in Trotternish, showing how most islanders lived a century and more ago.

Read about it
Did you know18 hours ago

The Staffin Dinosaur Museum on Skye was built by hand by one man, from a ruined schoolhouse.

Dugald Ross built the museum himself, with his own two hands, out of the ruin of a 19th-century schoolhouse.

See Staffin Dinosaur Museum · Isle of Skye
From our Isle of Skye guide16 hours ago

Angus MacAskill, the 7 foot 9 inch 'true giant' remembered in a museum at Dunvegan on Skye, was given a Guinness World Record for his height in 1981, more than a century after his death.

Angus was born in 1825 on Berneray, in the Sound of Harris, and grew up in Cape Breton, in Canada, where he became known as the Cape Breton Giant, with the strength to match his size. The museum that remembers him was opened in 1989 by a local man, Peter MacAskill, in memory of the most famous member of his clan. It is built inside a former croft, a low white cottage with a thick thatched roof on Dunvegan's main street, and it celebrates Angus as a real Skye hero. Inside, a life-size figure of the giant towers over every visitor, and the displays chart his life and his staggering height.

A life-size figure of Angus MacAskill in the Giant Angus MacAskill Museum, Dunvegan.See Giant MacAskill Museum · Isle of Skye
Did you know15 hours ago

The shore at Valtos, on Skye's Trotternish coast, gave Scotland its first record of a Jurassic dinosaur.

The sea cliffs there are layers of sandstone and mudstone laid down in a shallow lagoon, where fresh water and salt water once mixed. The site is one of Scotland's most important for the rocks and fossils of that age, and in 2019 it became one of the Skye fossil sites protected by law. Bones from the Valtos shore are now on show at the Staffin Dinosaur Museum, just along the road.

See Staffin Dinosaur Museum · Isle of Skye
Museums13 hours ago

Staffin Dinosaur Museum.

A small museum in an old schoolhouse at Ellishadder, by Kilt Rock, holding the best collection of Skye's dinosaur fossils.

See the place
Did you know10 hours ago

At the Skye Museum of Island Life, the Ceilidh House belonged to the tailor who had a wireless.

Mr MacKinnon, the local tailor, had one of the first wireless sets in the area, and most evenings the men gathered at his house to hear the news.

See Skye Museum of Island Life · Isle of Skye
Stay8 hours agoIsle of SkyeThe Dunvegan200 yardsIsle of SkyeThe Black Shed2.0 milesIsle of SkyeLochview2.4 miles

Stay near Giant MacAskill Museum.

The three good places closest to it: The Dunvegan, The Black Shed and Lochview.

See Giant MacAskill Museum
Did you know7 hours ago

Skye's black houses got their name because they had no chimney and no windows.

Early houses of this kind had no chimney and no windows. With cooking over an open fire they were dark and full of smoke, and visitors called them black houses.

See Skye Museum of Island Life · Isle of Skye
Did you know5 hours ago

When Dugald Ross began collecting as a boy, nobody knew Skye had dinosaur fossils at all.

When he began collecting as a child, no one knew there were dinosaur fossils on Skye at all. The university teams from Bristol, London and Oxford came later.

See Staffin Dinosaur Museum · Isle of Skye
From the magazine4 hours agoThe printed copy of Issue 03Issue 03Winter 2021

Dugald Ross, who was a builder and crofter on the Isle of Skye, found many of its dinosaur footprints and built a museum for them by hand.

Dugald, known as Dugie, grew up in the tiny Gaelic-speaking crofting hamlet of Ellishadder. At 15 he found a cache of arrow points and Bronze Age objects, and from then on he was hooked on the history of his island. He hunted fossils in his spare time, and many of the footprints and bones of the dinosaurs that walked on Skye some 170 million years ago were his finds. The palaeontologist Steve Brusatte called him the only person he knew who had built his own museum, by hand, from the ruins of a 19th-century one-room schoolhouse. The Staffin Museum, north of Portree on the A855, holds many of his most important finds, and it is worth checking it is open before you go. Dugie died in October 2025.

See Staffin Dinosaur Museum · Isle of Skye
Did you know2 hours ago

A family lived in the Old Croft House at the Skye Museum of Island Life until 1957.

The Old Croft House was built more than 200 years ago from local materials, and a family lived in it until 1957. It opened as the first cottage of the museum in 1965.

See Skye Museum of Island Life · Isle of Skye