First Published: 2018 December 7
Today, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to the Morpeth Chantry and Northumbrian Bagpipe Museum. While I wouldn’t recommend a trip to Morpeth just for the museum, the city was lovely, and I would highly recommend seeing it.
The museum itself was about the size of a typical exhibit in a full-sized museum, which was a little disappointing. More disappointing was the lack of examples of how the instrument sounds or chances to make it sound myself. They did have a cool thing where they’d rigged a set of the pipes to a piano keyboard so you could play a tune and make it sound, but it was broken.1
However, they’re a completely different beast from either Scottish war pipes or uilleann pipes. They’ve got a closed chanter, and are bellows driven, and look really cute. All this is to say: if anyone has2 a set of Northumbrian Pipes in need of a home, I promise to love and care for them.