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Historic Moray Elgin Museum is run by The Moray Society and is Moray's oldest independent museum. It has a spectacular new exhibition, People & Place featuring a thousand years of Scottish history with a Moray prospective. The fossils exhibits and Pictish stones are internationally renowned. From among the museum's 36,000 items there is a Roman hoard on display which was discovered on a local dig. The curator, an expert on Roman history, is on hand to share his knowledge. The collection includes important archives such as the George Gordon correspondence and Grant of Wester Elchies papers which consists of correspondence between family members of the Lairds of Wester Elchies (1780 -1920). The estate was a small part of the extensive lands owned by Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk. He sold Wester Elchies mansion and some surrounding lands to Robert Grant, a local lad who made good in Canada and London during 1786. Robert Grant styled himself first Laird of Wester Elchies. His descendants preferred to live at Carron house and were known locally as lairds of Carron. The last laird died in 1952. Other archive papers include some of the writings of Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. Recent acquisitions include a set of miniatures of the Parthenon Frieze (The Elgin Marbles) by John Henning |