Kirriemuir Camera Obscura
| Kirriemuir Camera Obscura | |
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| Grid reference: | NO391541 |
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| Website: | Kirriemuir Camera Obscura |
Kirriemuir Camera Obscura is a camera obscura built in Kirriemuir in Angus. It is housed in a purpose-designed turret room within the cricket pavilion on Kirriemuir Hill.
The technology may seem old-fashioned to those brought up in the digital age, but it is a fine system of its time and works well today, providing through ingenious mirrors, lenses and gears a secret view of the surrounding countryside. Without the camera obscura, there could have been no digital camera. That at Kirriemuir is a glimpse into an era when the production of remote images was seen as something almost magical, as well it might. There in the darkened interior of the camera obscura ("dark chamber") with a fine, sunny day outside, the images come bright upon the viewing table within showing the surrounding countryside alive and immediate.
It is owned by the National Trust for Scotland. Both the camera obscura and the cricket pavilion beside it were donated in 1930 by the author J M Barrie (1868–1937), a native son of Kirriemuir, whose birthplace is also a National Trust property hereabouts, open as a museum.