Treasured: Wonderful Things, Amazing Stories

13 December 2009

If you’re in Edinburgh over Christmas and looking for somewhere to take the kids, then look no further than the National Museum of Scotland’s Treasured exhibition. It’s a mini museum in itself, show casing objects from across the museum’s world wide collections while part of the building is closed for refurbishment, and hinting at the exhibits that will feature in the new galleries when they re-open in 2011. Here you can see everything from ancient fossils, Egyptian burials and Samurai armour, to an Enigma coding machine, a globe of the planet Mars, and a lighthouse lens; from models, figures and statues made of glass, terracotta, ivory, ceramic, enamel and precious metals, to a giant panda, a Napoleonic travel case, and a helmet decorated entirely with kingfisher feathers!

And if exploring all these wonderful and amazing objects isn’t enough, then there are plenty activities for the kids to get their hands on: mix and match colours and patterns on the bottle lightbox, find out what kind of pharaoh you are and print off a souvenir, try your hand at some puzzles and find out more about fossils along the way, and get dressed up in some replica costumes. Or to get some discussion going, watch the film where people take about their favourite treasures, then think about what you treasure and finish your visit by writing up your own and adding it to the wall.

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(Just a wee reminder that although I work for the National Museum of Scotland, this is a personal blog and all views and recommendations expressed here are my own. This review is based on personal visiting experiences with friends and family in my own time.)