Dr Isabel Grant

Dr Isabel Grant (1887-1983) lived on the ground floor of Number 35 Heriot Row. Her father - one of the Grants of Tullochgorm - was a Colonel in the 78^th and Seaforth Highlanders.  She was born in Edinburgh but brought up between London and the Highlands.

Her early interest in farming history was fed by reading the history of her mother’s family farm at Balnespick. In 1924, she published her first book ‘Everyday Life of an Old Highland Farm’. As her interest deepened, she travelled rural areas in the north of Scotland in her Morris 8 car, collecting farm implements and farm stories.  Her journeys coincided with huge changes in agriculture as heavy horses gave way to tractors, older tools were discarded and techniques forgotten. Many things she rescued were already rare, and perishable.

As her self-funded collection grew, she established a base, initially in a disused church on Iona. She drew on the open air folk museums developed in Scandinavia. She wanted to show the objects she collected as much as possible in relevant settings.  As her collection grew, it went through several sites in Speyside until its current location as the Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore. Whole buildings, rescued from parts of the northern mainland and islands, were added. Since 1975 the Museum has been run by Highland Council. Her own work was honoured with a doctorate from Edinburgh University in 1948 and an MBE in 1959.

Isabel Grant’s Heriot Row neighbour in the early 1970s, James Holloway, remembers her splendid 6pm soirees, fuelled by very strong White Lady cocktails. Her visitors perched on precarious chairs, one of which once unseated poet and folk revivalist Hamish Henderson with a loud thump. As party guests came from wildly diverse backgrounds, making conversation could be a challenge. James helped keep her garden and she knitted him a tank top in natural dyes. Isabel left him a small bequest. He spent it on a large chair, which no one could fall off.

In her later days, she converted to the Greek Orthodox faith. She had not lost her wide interest in things and had started to relearn French, well into her nineties.