The town's general-purpose museum, in Fitz Park, covering local history, geology, and the Lakeland literary set. The collection has the eccentric, semi-curated feel of a Victorian gentleman's cabinet — taxidermy, a flintlock pistol that once belonged to a local highwayman, manuscript poems by Southey and Coleridge, a fossilised ichthyosaur from the Whitehaven coast.
The most quoted exhibit is the musical stones — a set of slate bars from Skiddaw, cut and tuned in the 1840s, that you can still strike with mallets. It is also the museum's least appropriate exhibit for the noise-sensitive.