Grant was a scholar and a practical visionary. In 1930, she had organised the Highland Exhibition in Inverness, assembling 2,100 artefacts into what amounted to a national folk museum. Five years later, the permanent museum she founded on Iona quickly outgrew its church. By 1939 the collection had moved to the mainland at Laggan in Badenoch, and eventually to Kingussie, where Grant developed exhibitions designed to show "different aspects of the material setting of life in the Highlands in byegone days." She pioneered the use of live demonstrations to interpret exhibits for visitors -- weaving, rope-making, the daily work of a Highland household. Grant ran the museum until she was well into her eighties, dying in 1983 at the age of 96, having spent nearly half a century rescuing the tangible evidence of a way of life.

The current museum site at Newtonmore opened to the public in 1987 and operated alongside the Kingussie location until the older site closed in 2007. Spread across a large outdoor site, it contains both purpose-built reconstructions and historic buildings relocated from elsewhere in the Highlands and reassembled on site. In 2011, museum staff recreated a thatched cottage from a 19th-century photograph of a house that had stood in Grantown-on-Spey. The following year, landowners in Carrbridge donated a croft-house built in the 1920s, which staff and students dismantled and transported 22 miles to the museum. A Glenlivet sub-post office was acquired in 2000-2001. Each building tells a specific story: not the grand narrative of kings and battles, but the quieter history of how people heated their homes, fed their families, and survived Scottish winters.

At the heart of the museum is a reconstructed 1700s township, where staff dressed as Highlanders demonstrate the skills of an 18th-century community. The effect is less theatrical than it sounds. In the reconstructed blackhouse, with its low doorway and central hearth, the peat smoke catches in your throat. In the schoolhouse, the wooden benches are sized for children. The museum sits in the Strathspey landscape that shaped the lives it represents -- the River Spey nearby, the Cairngorms looming to the east, Newtonmore's main street a short walk away. The museum is owned by the Highland Council and administered by High Life Highland, the charitable body that manages cultural services across the Highlands. It draws visitors who come for the Cairngorms and stay to understand the people who lived in their shadow.