Monday just can’t come quickly enough for the staff and volunteers at the community-led Devil’s Porridge Museum in Eastriggs.
Like other museums, galleries, and libraries across the region they’ll be welcoming in visitors again for the first time since lockdown with a raft of health and safety measures in place.
They have spent the time preparing their purpose-built centre which houses a number of local heritage exhibitions and tells the story of the WWI munitions factory, HM Factory Gretna, and its 30,000 workforce from around the Commonwealth. Its cordite paste was nicknamed The Devil’s Porridge, by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on a visit.
And visitors can expect a few changes as the cafe has been given an upgrade to a Rennie Mackintosh-style with a nod to the architects who designed the garden villages of Eastriggs and Gretna and the WW1 state management pubs and coffee houses when the factory was up and running last century.
There will also be a new exhibition on pioneering female engineer, Dorothée Pullinger, after the success of an online talk last year.
Museum manager Judith Hewitt said: “We are really looking forward to Monday.
“During lockdown, we’ve been doing a lot of outreach online and we will be continuing with our successful digital research project and series of monthly online talks but we are, at the end of the day, a museum for people to visit and we are so looking forward to being up and running again offering our visitors a great day out.”
The museum will be open daily from Monday and booking prior to visiting is recommended via their website www.devilsporridge.org.uk
