Paper short abstract:

Small private ‘micro-museums’, highly popular tourist attractions run by enthusiastic owner-curators, are often invisible in heritage debates. The Museum of Witchcraft provides a valuable example of the ways in which these sites provide key opportunities for negotiating and representing heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Small, privately owned, museums are often highly popular attractions, much loved by visitors, keenly guarded by owner-curators, but lack visibility in heritage and academic discussions. Small private collections are often marginalised by academic interests, excluded by funding bodies and ineligible for charitable status, largely perceived as amateur projects outside of curatorial expertise. This ignores the rich seam found by visitors, owners, and volunteers in the potential for imagining heritage engaged through such passionate endeavours.

The Museum of Witchcraft, on the north Cornish coast, provides a vivid, and perhaps literal, example of the potential of small museums to enchant visitors, and attracts high numbers of annual visitors. Some of these are contemporary British Witches or Occultists who see the museum as a heritage for magical practitioners: for showing, sharing and explaining the history and practices of their religious craft. The museum relies on established ideas of Cornwall as a site of ancient, pre-Christian paganism to situate its magical expertise and knowledge. It also contributes to maintaining these notions, through its collection and narratives, as well as the expansion of magical intrigue into the surrounding landscape. This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on 'micro museums' as a key factor in the array of opportunities for negotiating heritage outside dominant institutions.