Case Study: The Scottish Mining Museum - Heritage Walk

Fergus Waters is the Director of The Scottish Mining Museum in Newtongrange, Midlothian. He has won the prize of the Tourism Intelligence Scotland Walking Tourism guide competition and is going to spend a long weekend at the Mar Lodge in the Cairngorms National Park. Here is his success story.

The Scottish Mining Museum has been using Tourism Intelligence Scotland first guide “Walking Tourism” to develop a new marketing strategy for 2008. Fergus Waters and his team are developing a Heritage Walk to add choice and value to their product.

The Heritage Walk is an urban walking project between the Museum and the Village which will be guided by local passionate historians. This walk aims to develop interest in the museum by incorporating the entire Heritage Site around Newtongrange village, which is the largest “coal village” in Europe.
This new product will be presented as part of the exhibition about mining social life and will be promoted on the Scottish Mining Museum’s website. A walking booklet is also being developed in collaboration with Midlothian Tourism Forum, Midlothian Council and VisitScotland.

Thanks to this new product, the Scottish Mining Museum hopes to grow their visitors number and attract a new audience. Fergus Waters and his team have also decided to target a new audience of walkers (“the committed and the Part Time Wanderer” profile of walkers) as increasingly people coming to the Museum ask for information about walking possibilities in the area. Fergus Waters said: “Basing our product development on sound market intelligence helps to ensure that our targeting of new audiences is based on facts not hunches. The Tourism Intelligence Scotland really helped us to do this”.

The hope is that this Heritage Walk will increase awareness that the Museum is about much more than just industry, and encompasses a much wider interpretation of the Heritage Site and the lives of the miners of the area.
The Heritage Walk will launch in summer 2008.