The former parish church of Farr was built in 1774 on a site of Christian use stretching back at least a thousand years. The Pictish Farr Stone, carved around 850 AD, still stands at the west gable, alongside three early grave markers - older than the church, older than the parish, older than the language now spoken in Bettyhill. In the 1950s the congregation moved to a new Church of Scotland building in Bettyhill, and the old church became redundant. Then Dr Ian Grimble, the historian and broadcaster, had an idea. He gathered a community group, and in May 1962 the Church of Scotland transferred the building to them for a peppercorn sum - one of the earliest community asset transfers anywhere in Scotland. The museum opened to the public in 1976. It was registered in 1994 and fully accredited under the museum accreditation scheme in 2013. Volunteers have run it from the start.

Strathnaver Museum exists to tell the story of what happened to the people of north-west Sutherland between roughly 1800 and 1850. The Countess of Sutherland and her husband the Marquess decided that their estate would be more profitable as sheep grazing than as the home of the thousands of tenants who lived in townships throughout the strath. The tenants were removed - sometimes with little warning, sometimes with their houses burned behind them while their belongings were still inside. They were resettled on barely cultivable coastal strips at Bettyhill, Bunahabhainn, and other crofting townships, where many failed to make a living and emigrated to Canada, Australia, or simply died. This was not an unforeseen catastrophe. It was an estate management decision, executed by paid agents, on instructions from people who never visited the cleared townships. The valley is empty now. Tour buses pass through and see only beauty. The museum exists to explain what the beauty conceals.

The original pulpit still dominates the main room, fronted by a reader's desk and a panelled, dated backboard initialled MGM - Master George Munro, minister from 1754 to 1779. Munro's tomb lies in the graveyard outside. The collection itself ranges across thousands of years: an intact Bronze Age burial beaker, an early 19th-century croft house display, agricultural and fishing tools, the gruesome dog-skin buoy that fishermen once used as a float, militaria, Clan Mackay memorabilia, and contemporary art responding to the strath's history. The Clan Mackay Centre occupies the first floor. In 2021 the museum began a major refurbishment funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, the Garfield Weston Foundation, and others - including, with deliberate irony, the decommissioning fund of the Dounreay nuclear site that now supports the local economy where crofting once did. The refurbished museum and a new annex relaunched on 13 May 2023.

Strathnaver Museum is not a national institution. It is held together by people who give their time. The community that built it, like the community whose history it preserves, did so by choice - in the absence of any larger structure that would do the work for them. The Highland Clearances are not in dispute as a historical fact, but their interpretation has long been contested. The descendants of those who left, scattered across the diaspora from Canada to New Zealand, return to Bettyhill in summer to find headstones with their grandparents' names. The museum stands in the place where the eviction notices were read. It is the closest thing to a memorial that this stretch of coast has.