Introduction
With a view to connecting the work of the Highland Folk Museum with the wider history of the region the museum serves, we turned to James Hunter. Both as a historian of the Highlands and as someone who's played an active part in the area's public life, he's been much involved in helping reshape thinking about the northern half of Scotland. A former director of the Scottish Crofters Union, and former chair of the board of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the North of Scotland's government-funded development agency, Jim's books include The Making of the Crofting Community (Birlinn), A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (Mainstream) and Last of the Free: A Millennial History of the Highlands and Islands (Mainstream).

At one stage, Jim expressed some scepticism about the role of museums in a Highland context - on the grounds that it's more important, or so he argued, to safeguard existing Highland communities and their culture than it is to preserve objects left over from the past. In the hope that what's been achieved here might persuade him to modify that stance, we invited Jim to spend a day or two at the Highland Folk Museum and in its general vicinity. What follows are his reflections on this experience - reflections which emphasise that, his former views notwithstanding, this leading Highland historian now regards the Highland Folk Museum as an essential access-point to the history of the Highlands.

"The past can easily be read about: in books; in the documentation which we store in national or local archives and which constitutes the raw material on which historians, like me, ultimately rely. The past can also be observed - in more or less authentic versions - on screen. But what's on offer at the Highland Folk Museum is something else entirely. Here visitors have the opportunity to experience, in a direct and unmediated fashion, what it was actually like to live in earlier eras."

"I became a total convert to the Highland Folk Museum concept. There and then, I decided that, when folk ask me (as folk do now and then) how they might best set about exploring Highland history, I'll direct them in future to the clustered buildings comprising the settlement its Highland Folk Museum originators have christened Baile Gean."

"As has already happened to me more than once at the Highland Folk Museum, I feel as close as I have ever felt to a time long in advance of my own."

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