The Derwent Pencil Museum opened its doors in 1981, telling the story of the humble pencil – from its graphite beginnings to its use in modern day schools.
It is home to the world’s biggest colouring pencil, and attracts around 80,000 visitors a year.
If you are in Cumbria, it’s worth visiting. I took my family there a few years’ back and we had a nice time.
I wanted to go, not because I have a great fascination with writing implements – although bring me a pack of Palamino Blackwing 602s and you’ve got a friend for life – but because the Derwent Pencil Museum features in a fairly obscure British serial killer movie called Sightseers.
The museum is not even in the film for very long, but I was a fan of the movie’s overpowering strangeness and I thought seeing one of its locations for myself would be a bit of a thrill.
That might seem like a weird thing to do, but there are billions of film fans like me who will understand.
Every year, movie tourists come to the UK to visit sites from their favourite features, generating around £140 million for the country’s economy.
Among the big winners is Alnwick Castle, used as Hogwarts in some of the Harry Potter movies.
Which is why there is high hopes for the hugely anticipated Robert the Bruce epic Outlaw King.
The Netflix-funded feature, directed by Perthshire film-maker David Mackenzie, is the biggest ever movie production to be shot in Scotland, with scenes filmed at Doune, Glencoe and Stirling.
If it’s a hit, it will encourage a whole new generation of film fans from across the globe to visit Scotland.
And Outlaw King has already made us a small fortune, with production crews spending about £17.5m during the year-long shoot.
A recent study by Creative Scotland revealed that all production companies and film crews spent £95m in 2017, a huge leap from £45m in 2014.
But while show business means big business for Scotland, there has been a comparative lack of action in Perth and Kinross.
A plush booklet produced by VisitScotland – sub-titled “A Film Fan’s Odyssey – highlights some of the best locations for film tourism, such as Pennan (from Local Hero) and Culzean Castle, featured in the Wicker Man.
It’s fair to say the Perthshire section struggles a bit to come up with some titles: The Descent and The Descent Part Two, anyone?
Given the vast woodlands, mountains, lochs and historic towns on offer, there’s plenty of local sites for location scouts to chose from.
So the campaign to bring more films to Perthshire starts here (to be fair, it was probably started by someone else, some time ago). And I won’t rest until we all get to enjoy the sight of the Hulk smashing his way through Perth City Hall, or Godzilla trampling cars in Crieff high street.
