Trimontium Museum

Project Description

We (Trimontium Trust) are a volunteer-led, volunteer-run charity (SC050613) that seeks to promote a better understanding of Scotland’s deep past, concentrating on the period of the Roman Iron Age. We do this by means of running a small, but nationally respected, independent museum and freely offering our extensive programme of education and outreach, focused on the physical and mental benefits of community archaeology.

We have been in existence for thirty years and our compact museum, on premises gifted from Scottish Borders Council (SBC), had become very tired and was no longer able to tell the story of this exciting period to a modern public. In addition, we had no space for our educational activities or focus for our volunteer body. Over the last decade, our volunteer numbers, drawn from across the Borders area, were also falling as the previous generation became infirm or passed away. To reverse this decline, we formed a project group to revitalise the work of the Trust by redesigning the museum and creating a new multipurpose space – two actions that would provide new energy for a new generation. This was done after a period of local consultation and open events that sought opinions on function and design from the local community.

And so, a two-stage project was conceived to: i) completely refurbish Scotland’s only museum of the Roman Iron Age and ii) to extend the footprint of the museum to include a new purpose-built community archaeology centre – HALO – the Heritage And Landscape Observatory. The project was designed to make better use of the limited museum space within the Victorian Ormiston building and the small patch of land immediately adjacent. We decided to stay at the heart of the community, breathing new life into an existing structure and complimenting it with a contrasting modern structure that would provide much needed educational space and become a focus of our community archaeology projects.

We had very little resource at the outset with which to do this, starting with a project fund of just three thousand pounds. However, after considerable hard work and a number of false starts, we received an initial grant from the Buccleuch Trust and then were awarded a major National Lottery Heritage grant to really get the project going. This allowed us to stepwise increase our core of professional help, with the ultimate appointment of Ray Cherry, from SBC, as chief architect, and Campbell and Co as museum designers. Further grants followed from a number of awards bodies including South of Scotland Enterprise, the Turtleton Trust and many generous individual donors. Of course COVID also intervened but in fact, despite the adversity of multiple lockdowns, our project, thanks in large part to our brilliant design team and builders, hardly missed a beat, with the first part of the project, the renovated museum, opening virtually on time and on budget in April 2022. There followed more energetic fundraising for the HALO building and it too was completed in July 2023 on time and on budget. Part of this success is due to a deliberate attempt to keep supply chains short and wherever possible, use local materials and personnel.