The museum, dates from around 1728. Originally two cottages, probably miners’ cottages, the building has been altered several times in its long life. The room behind the right hand cottage was originally a single-roomed cottage dating from the mid seventeenth century.

The cottage, itself a part of Old Grassington, could not be a better place to illustrate the village’s long history. 

Medieval Grassington was the most important village in Upper Wharfedale, it was industry as much as farming which created the Grassington we see today. Grassington was as much a part of the Industrial Revolution as Manchester or Bradford. Local mills, originally water-powered corn mills at Linton Falls (the site now being occupied by a small housing estate completed in 1988), grew into textile mills which flourished until the huge steam-powered mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire cities, close to major lines of communication, made the isolated Dales mills uneconomic.