Museum of Edinburgh and the National Museum of Scotland

It wouldn't be like me to visit a city without picking off a few museums. So this time I went to the big and the small. The small being the Museum of Edinburgh, which is free and based in a historic house on Canongate. Which has a few unsurprising drawbacks - not being purpose built there isn't much of a flow to the exhibition rooms. And every single floorboard creaks. Loudly. However hard one tries to tread softly

But teh museum has nice bite-sized collections of Edinburgh silver

And Edinburgh glass. And indeed ceramics

As well as an interesting little video on the building of the New Town, and the original plans for it.

The below photo gives you a feel for the museum. In part it is showing off the house as well as the exhibits. And it is not exactly wheelchair friendly.

By contrast the Scottish National Museum is vast and eclectic, having both an impressive Victorian purpose built part - see below photo of atrium with the galleries in three floors branching off it, and a new extension. This combination also makes it a little hard to follow - there are just so many staircases

But while the museum as a whole is eclectic - it is a science museum, a natural history museum, an ethnographic museum, a museum of Scotland and a museum of the world - at least its disparate parts form little museums of their own. The ancient collections are in a basement in the modern section. The history of Scotland is well set out (over a number of floors). I had done the ancient and medieval section sin August so I started this visit with basically Mary Queen of Scots

There is a very fine collection of Scottish artefacts that I didn't try to photograph

The science section tries to cover inventions and industry with a particular emphasis on Scotland. So below is a car from the Argyll factory, which I had never even heard of, but produced cars in the early part of the twentieth century

And I am particularly interested in minerals and rocks and there is a nice section on that - not particularly Scottish focussed. This massive amethyst geode is from Brazil.

And the top floor has a sculpture gallery with a smattering of everything and every culture

It is a huge place and I will certainly return and "do" some more bite size bits in future visits