Despite some damage incurred during the 2015 floods, Ambleside's excellent little museum is now back up and running. It hosts some intriguing seasonal exhibitions alongside its core collection, populated with artefacts relating to important Lakeland characters such as National Trust founder Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, pioneering Lakeland photographers Herbert Bell and the Abraham Brothers and a certain Beatrix Potter, who bequeathed a number of botanical watercolours to the museum, along with several first editions of her books.
There are also original canvases by the modernist artist Kurt Schwitters, a German refugee who settled in Ambleside after WWII.